The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (41 page)

What’s the deal with that Ron Jeremy dildo we’ve seen in sex novelty stores? Is that really molded after your own penis?

Y
ou’re damn right it is, and it’s very popular. When I was shooting the movie
Boondock Saints
, Sean Patrick Flanery came to the set with a box full of my dildos and asked me to autograph them. I have no idea what he was doing with a box full of dildos, but I was too flattered to tease him about it.

Has a mold of your penis ever been used in an art exhibit?

B
elieve it or not, the answer is yes. I visited an art gallery in Amsterdam, and the curators asked me to dip my penis into cement, which they then used to make an exact replica. You want to talk about pressure. It’s one thing if somebody is just going to see my cock, but this would be
forever
. Future generations would be looking at this mold and judging me long after I’d passed on.

The curators were kind enough to leave me alone with one of their salesgirls. She was hugging and kissing me while I jerked myself and tried to get the circulation moving in the right direction. I was getting closer, but then I started to hear voices coming from upstairs. The gallery was still open for business, and one of the patrons was carrying around a very upset baby. It was crying so loudly that the shrieks were echoing throughout the gallery. Unless you’re a bit weird, this isn’t the sort of thing to put you in a sexual mood.

I tried to block out the baby’s bawling, but it was ruining my concentration. So even though I usually love kids, I yelled out, “Would somebody please tell that baby to shut the hell up?!
Some
of us are trying to get an erection down here!”

The mother took the hint and left the gallery. My boner returned, I dunked it into cement, and everybody was happy.

As your penis is so valuable, have you ever considered taking out an insurance policy on it?

Y
ou mean like with Lloyd’s of London? It’s not a bad idea, actually. Performing in porn can be a precarious profession. I was once observing a scene with Samantha Fox and Bobby Astyr on a porn set in Hollywood. They aimed the lights under Bobby’s legs for what’s called an “Australian down under” angle, which is where the camera gets a shot of the penetration from beneath the guy’s legs. I was standing above them, watching while Bobby was banging away from behind, and out of nowhere, we caught a whiff of this weird odor. None of us had any idea what it could be. But then Bobby looked down and saw that the lights had moved in a little too close and were burning the hairs on his balls. He screamed and did a double-flip somersault with a half gainer right into the pool. It was like somebody had pressed a hot iron to his testicles. I think he broke an Olympic diving record. I’m not sure if he ever fully recovered, and since then I’ve been
extremely
conscious of where the lights are at all times.

When you die, are you going to donate your penis to science?

N
ot a chance. But I have been asked. When I was in Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, I visited the Phallological Museum. It’s a museum devoted to penises, and there are well over a hundred cocks on display, with specimens from the entire animal kingdom. They have reindeer penises, walrus penises, skunk penises, whale penises, everything. The cocks were mounted on walls, stuffed in jars, and embalmed in formaldehyde. I believe it’s the only museum in the world like this.

I spoke with Sigurdur Hjartarson, the owner and head “phallologist,” and he asked if I’d be willing to donate my penis to the museum after I died. I told him, “Hell, no! I’m an American. When I croak, my cock stays on American soil.” Maybe I’ll bequeath it to the Smithsonian if they want it. Or to one of my ex-girlfriends. But otherwise, it goes right in the ground with the rest of me.

W
hile my penis was always my most famous appendage, there was another part of me that threatened to overshadow it, taking over as my most defining characteristic.

My belly.

As you’ll no doubt notice from my pictures during the 1970s and early ’80s, I wasn’t always fat. There was a time when you could have even called me skinny. I had a trim belly and washboard abs, and I was in the best shape of my life. But something happened during the last few decades. I started snacking and haven’t stopped. And I packed on the pounds like I was expecting to be stranded on a deserted island. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought that the metabolism of my youth would keep up with me. But apparently it decided to give up the fight and let the calories take over, and I puffed up faster than a balloon filled with helium. As I’ve said before, I went from the gym to the buffet. I went from posing in
Playgirl
to
Field & Stream
.

It never stopped me from getting work in porn. If anything, I was getting
more
jobs now that I was on the beefy side. Porn directors couldn’t get enough of me, and apparently audiences shared their enthusiasm. How could this be, you ask? How could such a flabby guy, who couldn’t even look down and see his own dick if he’d eaten too large a meal, continue to be a performer in adult films?

Well, as I’ve said many times in my stand-up routines, I am living proof that anybody can get laid. When you watch a porno with somebody like Peter North or TT Boy—both hunky, muscular guys—it’s what you expect. Of
course
they’re getting plenty of sex. Where’s the surprise in that? But when people see me in a porno, they think, If
this
guy is getting lucky in the sack, maybe there’s hope for me!

Audiences identify with me because I’m just like them. I’m not a statuesque physical specimen, and, let’s be honest, very few guys are. I’m just a normal schlub who happens to have the kind of sex life that most men can only dream about. And there’s something inspirational in that. I like to think that I’ve given confidence to millions of men across the world. They look at themselves in the mirror and think, Y’know, compared to Ron Jeremy, I’m not that bad looking at all. Then they go out and, with their faith restored in their own sexual allure, actually muster the courage to talk to that hottie at the other end of the bar.

If you think of it that way, you might even say that I’m the defender of all men who think that only the pretty boys are allowed to get nookie. Or at least that’s what I tell myself whenever I go back to the buffet for seconds. Good rationale, huh?

My peers in the porn community haven’t been quite so generous. Once I started to let myself go, it was open season on Ron Jeremy jokes. When Bill Margold first called me “The Hedgehog” during the late 1970s, I was still skinny enough to dismiss it. But as I got older and fatter and my already hirsute body sprouted hair like a Chia Pet, it wasn’t so easy to escape Bill’s increasingly accurate nickname. I did look like a hedgehog. I was short and chunky and undeniably furry. I couldn’t very well refute my eerie physical similarities with the pilose rodent.
*

Screw
magazine publisher Al Goldstein wasn’t satisfied with that less-than-flattering moniker. He once lobbied to have my nickname officially changed to “The Manatee.” During a visit to his Florida mansion, I was swimming in the pool, doing flips and somersaults through the water and off the diving board, and he took one look at me and said, “You’re not a hedgehog. You’re a big, fat underwater creature.” He wrote an article in
Screw
and again in
Penthouse
saying I should file for tax-exempt status because I’m an endangered species.

Mark Carriere, my friend and boss at Leisure Time, wanted to take it even further. He decided that I more closely resembled a chupacabra, the mythical South American beast that sucks the blood out of goats. It’s half man, half beast, and all stomach. The nickname caught on, and now even my closest friends call me “Chup.”

So now you have a choice. I’m a Hedgehog, a Manatee, or a Chupacabra, depending on who you want to believe.

I never took any of it personally, because I knew that it was all meant in jest. The worst slurs usually came from my friends, and if you’re too thin skinned to endure a little mockery from your friends, you’re probably taking yourself
way
too seriously.

Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt hated when I would flirt with his daughter, Theresa Flynt. Whenever I’d stop by the Rainbow Bar & Grill or the Hustler Store not even to see her, she’d grab her cell phone and say, “I’m calling Daddy.” She’d put me on the phone with Larry and he’d say (half in jest), “What the hell are you doing with my daughter?”

“Nothing, nothing,” I’d say. “I swear!”

“You keep your hands off of her, Jeremy. I don’t want your filthy DNA anywhere near her.”

During one of my visits to Larry’s office, he told me, “There’s only one thing that would make me want to kill myself. And that’s if my daughter ever left her husband to be with you.”

“Wait a minute,” I’d say. “What about Dennis Hof?” Dennis was the proprietor of the Bunny Ranch, and a close friend of both Larry and me. “He’s a fucking pimp. He owns a brothel. Why isn’t he on the list?”

Larry just looked at me and said, in a completely deadpan voice, “Kill myself.”

“I’m a nice Jewish boy. I have some money in the bank. I’m a former schoolteacher with six years of college. Your daughter could do worse than me.”

“Kill myself.”

“And you didn’t even mention Al Goldstein. He’s a fat, obnoxious old man. He can’t even wipe his own ass without an intern. Why does he get a free pass?”

“Kill myself.”

“What if she asked to marry me? What if we were in love and there wasn’t anything you could do to stop it?”

“Kill myself.”

Mark Carriere had the most fun finding new ways to make a mockery of me. He took some of my old movies and gave them new titles that were designed to emphasize my Falstaff-like qualities. He retitled one of them
The Humpster
and gave it the tagline: “He’s fat, he’s hairy, he’s ugly, he’s the Humpster.” He called another film
Ugly Fuckers
, which later became
Fuckin’ Ugly
.

I let most of it roll off my back. Try as he might, Mark could never come up with a title that crossed the line. That honor belonged to Adam Rifkin.

My first mistake was introducing Adam to Mark at all. I thought they might get along since they seemed to share a similar sense of humor. But I was really pushing my luck when I invited them both out to dinner. Putting them in the same room was a recipe for tragedy. Mark decided that it was an excellent opportunity to brainstorm porn title ideas; the more deprecating to me, the better. Vivid had recently released a film starring one man and lots of women titled
The World’s Luckiest Man
. Mark owned a film with
me
and lots of women, so Adam suggested, “How about
The World’s Unluckiest Women
.”

Mark laughed so hard I thought he was having a stroke. I could have killed them both.

I
t wasn’t enough for me to be the biggest porn star on the planet. I needed a challenge, to prove once and for all to the industry that I wasn’t just a one-trick pony. I wanted to show them that I was more than a fat man with a big dick. I looked for anything to justify my fame. If there was a first happening in porn, I wanted to be a part of it. A director needed an actor to have sex with lifelike, synthetic dolls? I’d do it. They were shooting a five-hundred-man gang bang and needed an emcee? I’d step up to the plate. They wanted someone to bone an elderly woman for a fetish video? I was their man.

It’s all true, I’m afraid. Even the part about sex with an elderly woman.

It was for a movie called
87 and Still Bangin’
, and, just as the title indicated, I did indeed have sexual relations with an eighty-seven-year-old woman. But in my defense, the film had socially redeeming value. I wanted to prove to the world that you’re never too old to have sex.

My costar was a lovely widow named Rosie who had been trying for years to find a lover, mostly by taking out personals ad in national newspapers. When the producers at Heatwave Video learned about her, they called and offered to put her in an adult film. And then they hired me because, well, I suppose because I said yes.

The sex lasted only a few minutes, and I’ll say this much for Rosie, she was astonishingly agile for her age. The best part of the film was that we played off of each other like a veteran comedy duo.

“So what made you decide to do an adult film?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I haven’t been able to find many men my own age who are able to keep an erection.”

“Uh, Rosie, most of the men your age have been dead for ten years.”
*

I was breaking sexual records left and right. I had supposedly already surpassed Tom Byron for the most adult films.
**
We were neck and neck for many years, but I finally beat him (I think) with more than eighteen hundred titles to my credit. But there was one hurdle that I’d yet to jump. I had never, in my twenty-five years in the adult business, had sex in front of a live audience.

During the 1970s, most of my porn peers were doing live sex shows. Actors like Joey Silvera and Jamie Gillis would have sex onstage at Show World in Times Square, and they were making incredible money. But I never even considered it. I was making a good living in porn films, and I didn’t need the extra income. And besides, I always felt like doing live shows was giving away too much. If my fans (all three of them) wanted to see Ron Jeremy have sex, they had to go to a theater and buy a ticket like everybody else.

But as I approached my fiftieth birthday, I felt like the time was right to make the plunge. I wanted to try it at least once, just to see if I could do it. I was invited to the 2000 Internext Convention in Las Vegas, which hosted “live content” evenings. Basically, the creators of Internet sex sites would pay a hefty fee to attend a live sex show. They would photograph all of the action and then use the photos on their Web sites.