• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 816 0

not quite blearily dawned. (In the better-stocked outlets along Eighth Avenue, you’d see guys going up to the counter with their arms full of shiny VHS cassette boxes, stocking up as if preparing for a long siege that might disrupt supply routes.) The Naked City conferred a cloak of anonymity, the opportunity to go undetected, unjudged. Even if one (and by “one” I mean me, and by “me” I mean a bodiless junior me delegated to revisit the past) decided to head-duck into a porn theater to catch a double feature of The Filthy Five and The Promiscuous Sex or some other inspired booking, it was considered discourteous to sit too near another patron, a buffer zone of two empty seats considered adequate, three exemplary, and choosing a different row altogether the truly gallant thing to do. Walking into the middle of a movie and asking someone to clarify a plot point—very poor form. Unlike gay men, whose porn-going was of a more active, participant nature, based on the recitals I’ve heard, straight men preferred to be left alone with their sunken thoughts in such situations without the chapel spell being broken, even those masturbating away as if to the beat of a Sousa march. In a memoir published in The New Yorker, David Denby describes attending a porn film with Pauline Kael, Pauline wanting to be up on the latest thing and perhaps throw a scare into William Shawn at the prospect of her turning in four thousand words on The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann. Denby reports that Pauline’s verbal captioning for the action on-screen was unwelcomed by those in the audience trying to concentrate and lose themselves in the beauty of the moment. “She was the only woman in the room. Onscreen, one of the studs melted for an instant and Pauline let out a loud, disappointed, ‘Awww.’ Men in black raincoats sitting nearby rustled in their seats. After a few minutes, two rounded bottoms appeared, juxtaposed one on top of the other, and Pauline said, ‘That’s sort of sweet.’ The raincoats turned and glared angrily in our direction; some of them stalked out.”

Not every porn audience was as rapt as Antonioni fans trying to figure out what gives with Monica Vitti in Red Desert. Heckling voices were often raised during bad-dialogue scenes, of which there was no scarcity, voices that tended to belong to black men amusing themselves mightily and their fellow comedy fans. In one porn parody of a sci-fi epic, in which costumes and scenery owed pretty much everything to the crinkly versatility of aluminum foil, an actor so blatantly homosexual that he didn’t bother feigning otherwise saucily informed the Empress Z’anna that he was going to ram his royal scepter deep inside her, to which a voice piped up, “Better ask your boyfriend first.” Another time, when a porn stud sought to ejaculate on his co-star’s face and overshot the landing area, hitting the pillow, someone chortled, “Y’ missed, Robin Hood!” Such merry interjections were not the norm, however. Young and middle-aged couples would occasionally date-night at a porn film so that they could snuggle together and feel adventurously naughty, presumably hoping to take away a few pointers that they could put into practice later, the cuties cozying into their seats for a bit of fun only to become uncomfortable with the sexual entrées being projected in proctological detail, their giggles and whispered asides drying up as the power plays between the characters on-screen got ugly, too forcibly overt and face-slapping for any ironic distance. As such couples slunk off in Napoleonic defeat, their bodies remained in a head-ducked semi-crouch all the way across the row and up the aisle, Groucho Marx–style, as if fleeing the scene of a bad idea. Some of them may be grandparents now, chuckling at the memory. Flickering shadows on the screen, migrating shadows in the theaters, and a Proustian forget-me-not bouquet flavoring the air—it is the sickly sweet reek of cherry disinfectant that conjures porn in the seventies for me, a candied aroma that imbued XXX theaters in Manhattan with a mortuary subduement, a certain