The Cold-Cut Crackpot Life Of Al Goldstein
Al Goldstein (RIP), lovable, despisable, annoying crackpot pornographer built the Screw empire and then saw it crumble in the early years of the 21st century. He ended up reduced to working as a greeter in a Lower Manhattan deli, eventually ending up homeless – some say.
bart plantenga
I sometimes wrote for Screw, most memorably, for me, as part of the Screw Yorker parody issue. Me and X had been commissioned by A.G. to photograph his walk-in closet stuffed with hundreds of cameras because the IRS and insurance companies did not believe he had so many (100+).
“Don’tchu know,” X, who’d somehow come to dislike me, said on the way over, “he only published you because he had the hots for V [my ex].” I had never viewed my talent in this light before.
9:00 am: It is just another morning when I shimmy into a quilted blubber jacket, developed by Hollywood special effects labs (based on an idea by artist Joseph Beuys). No stunt man rotund enough was willing to double for A.G. in the X-rated remake of Minnesota Fats. And so I was given the op. The commissioned outfit became me, some would say, like armor became Ben Hur, like fish scales became Darryl Hannah.
We whisk down to Katz’s East European Spa in A.G.’s liver-colored Lincoln. In the sauna, we’re treated to prosciutto brioches and pickled primate knuckles while wannabe pornlets diligently service His Holy Flubbiness with tender post-grad knowingness. I am over-heated; I am drinking an iced cucumber cocktail and the hair-perfect starlets have been instructed to rivet their tender fists into A.G.’s fathomless folds of flubber with a safe but arousing, corkscrew-fist-torque effect.
9:30 am: I remove my blubber jacket to expose the 10 lb. weights strapped to my wrists. A.G.’s are of a lighter weight. This is how we eat our brioches in the mist when suddenly we notice Pornlet A. donning a fake-fur oven mitt and commences to onanize A.G. Pornlet B., meanwhile, positions a gold spittoon under his meager spigot, mocking him in an arousing manner by counting down the seconds (usually under 60 – which makes him much appreciated for his “efficiency” among his informal harem of Club-57-SVA stripper-performance-artists).
10:30 am: At the Weight Loss Research Institute, A.G. volunteers his preeminent flubbiness (he calls it a “natural resource”) to undergo Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis to assist controversial research into a direct-suction, umbilical-style tube that will feed fat directly from his tallowed abdominal source into the bosoms of cleavage-starved housewives and the haunches of selected ambitious actresses. With prosciutto on his breath, he admits: “I feel like dada – like a mama dada!”
11:30 am: On our way to a case pending in Municipal Court, he finishes off a special-delivery Carnegie Deli Deluxe half-sub and grabs a beauty nap stuck in a 7th Avenue traffic jam with corned beef coins dipped in cucumber juice lodged in his eye sockets.
Noon: A.G. is in Municipal Court to sue (for him, suing is a hobby) photographer Taz Arrozer for a photo-montage he’d produced for Details that superimposes A.G.’s bloated noggin onto a warthog’s hirsute carcass, hung upside down in a Paris boucherie. A montage he’d only a week earlier praised as a “piece of genuine genius.”
1:00 pm: At a victory lunch at the HardTimes Café, A.G. admits that in 1970 he actually officially dropped the “L” from his last name, as in “Godstein,” never being above self-ridicule in his daily ritual of self-over-estimation. He orders a hunk of corned beef sculpted into the shape of what some say is Goya’s “Reclining Nude.”
A.G., continuing to believe that his intimate bad habits are newsworthy, admits he is nightly treated to the expensive pleasures of the flesh from wannabe actresses who have grown accustomed to his tendency to dig deep into their skin, saving the epidermal residue (the grungy layers of sweat and baby oil-drenched flesh from under his fingernails) for later. He savors his mining haul, all but devouring this crud, this epidermal residue, from under his fingernails. He estimates that he consumes nearly a pound of this per month. These were the strangest of times.
3:00 pm: We visit Flubberama, a Utopia Parkway jiggle club, run by a convicted Mormon pederast, but interesting to our story because the dancers, all aerodynamically dreamlike, have been generously enhanced and augmented by the transference of A.G.’s flubberly wealth – he is, after all, a man willing to makes sacrifices in efforts to “beautify America.” So, when A.G. gloats that these curve-hungry dirty dancers were in a sense, his “daughters” it is not some absurd stretch of the truth.
4:30 pm: Kim Kong, his dry cleaner on 7th Ave., in a puff of hubris, reveals the secret of cleaning A.G.’s gold lamé g-strings, reinforced with braided tungsten wire. Kong maintains their voluptuous shape by ingeniously placing shrink-wrapped imported prunes in their cups to maintain their proper testicular shape.
6:00 pm: A.G. is a man of social concerns. As a recent profile emphasizes: “his compulsive Williamsburg-bred self-deprecating wit is matched only by his width, his ghost-written myth is matched only by his girth. It is estimated that he has had enough lumpen lard liposucked from his fubsy fuselage to feed all the Eskimos until 2020 AD.”
At a black-tie affair for – I forget – some foundation, he pledged one half of his actual self (242 pounds of flubberized largesse) to the Aleutian Inuit who, as a result of recent ecological disasters, have seen the tragic life-threatening near-disappearance of two prime food sources – the walrus and the whale.
8:15 pm: One of the highlights my time as his “blubber brother” occurred when A.G., portly prince of porn, stood in for another befamed A.G. – Allen Ginsberg – at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project FUNdament Festival, reading a portion of “A Supermarket in California,” taking staged, dramatic pauses at the lines “lonely old grubber, poking among the meats” and “Who killed the pork chops?” to take healthy chomps from his 2nd Avenue Deli hot corned beef on rye sandwich for comic effect.
He also read his “own” “St. Sebastian You and Your Bastard Good Looks” before a tough audience of 400. This poem had actually been co-ghost-penned by myself and X, as we were plied by a sizable platter of blintzes, pierogies, coleslaw and generous goblets of iced Kauffman Evreiskiy Jewish Standard Russian Vodka …
Memorable line: “Gerard de Nerval, from the lamppost you hung in desperate Paris nite, and I swung from your hardon and stirred all in sight with the howl that furnished my bowels with light!”
After generous applause, in hasty retreat, we were confronted at the door by a young post-Joe Dellasandro plagiarism, a former Ginsberg proofreader, who pressed a copy of his book, My IncontinentAl Lover, into our midst. A.G., of course, was all too happy to lap up any praise that might be bouncing about, even praise directed at others – in this case, the other A.G.
9:30 pm: We enter Hell’s Bells, a grunge-chic, ex-sailor dive, which has accrued a certain rep because of its one-legged strippers, bronzed snakehandlers, midget Rockettes and bands who bang heads into garbage cans rigged with boom mikes. There was boot leather and chrome, sneers and mockery, Prozac and Ecstasy, and pretty faces that said “eat or be eaten.” Patrons here seek out their holy self-inflicted poverty to imbue life with a sense of heroic squalor.
Blossom Dearie traipses out on stage dressed as Barbarella-comes-to-Boheme in her titanium spandex bodysuit detailed with two winkie-dink winking eye pasties and a chastity belt with the menacing jaws of a shark painted on it. She dances through a forest of “heart aches” in silver-barbed knee-high boots with her “partner,” a vibrating dildo chanting: “Celebrate the liberator! Celebrate the vibrator!”
Then the stage lit up blood red: Time for Nina Haagen’s Deliwear Show. Slabs of beef hung from hooks skirting the stage. Muscular men in abattoir white and beefbone codpieces carried women out over their shoulders the way they’d deliver sides of beef. Some models were dressed in hula skirts of sheer deli-thin slices of dried beef. Others flaunted olive loaf bikinis, bologna berets, bacon bowlers, wishbone earrings, pigskin shoes with horse hoof heels & dazzling jackets of an overlapping prosciutto, salami and saucisse sec spangled mail.
A.G. mounts the stage awkwardly (a kind of mini-drama in itself) and in true rotund magnanimity begins to chomp away the liverwurst ensembles, ham culottes, pig intestine belts from the bodies of the models.
Haagen’s coup de grease, her chef de left oeuvres, is her steackhaché manteaus, downcoats and vests with raw hamburger stuffed into clear sacks,quilted and sewn together. At the bar I overhear some mumble denunciation, while others christen her “Deli Gaultier.” Someone said Haagen grew up as the daughter of a Berlin butcher and was inspired by how the American Plains Indian utilized the entire buffalo.
For an idle moment, without looking into my eyes (myths don’t make eye contact) she fingers the flubber of my jacket and says: “Porcine or porcino?” But before I can respond (cleverness is not always instantly accessible) she darts off, out of sight forever.
10:45 pm: A.G. shaves in his limo and quickly changes into “the ugliest Playboy Bunny-in-drag ever” and in Purgatoria comes on like a Sumo Buddha with his tattered condom headband, his grimy pink fluffy ears to wrestle an Al Sharpton lookalike in a vat of Jello – all for a good cause.
12:00 am: At Jackie 60’s, he enters a “Roseanne Barre Look-Alike Contest” and wins!
12:30 am: He reminds me to remind him to check his liposuction transfer schedule for tomorrow. Arrange for press.
1:00 am: My action-bloated day of research as an A.G. stand-in-stunt-double is finally whittling to an end. I mimic A.G., lean back, neck on the limo seat back, as we apply soothing anti-wrinkle cucumber-juice-soaked salami slices over our aching eyes, as the limo whisks me back to my garret, a new man. As I reach for the door on East 13th, A.G. leans over, declares in his deepest sincere-like voice: “You are now fully prepped to make of me more than I have been able to make of myself. You will do my mother proud – god bless her.”
1:30 am: I am home, the calendar on the fridge says shooting begins this weekend. I remove my quilted blubber jacket as if I am climbing out of a cocoon; I hang it over the chair back, and stare: it looks a little like the Ninja Turtle, Donatello, a white flabbier cousin version. I shiver and feel suddenly naked, incomplete.
[will appear in the developing story collection THE LAUGH TRACK FAILS]
