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Blacks and Jews

In the summer of 1981, Screw magazine Senior Editor Josh Alan Friedman noticed a beautiful blonde out his art director's 11th-floor window in lower Manhattan. He yelled to her for her phone number and she yelled it back just before her roommates at the Markle Evangeline Hall (a dormitory for young Southern women going to school in New York) shut her mouth.

Josh dialed and advised his future wife Peggy Bennett, "Don't ever give out your phone number to strangers in this city."

"Well, just who are y'all?"

"We're Screw," he said. "And thank God you gave your number to us. If you'd been across from Time-Life, you would have really fallen in with some perverts."

Son of novelist (A Mother's Kisses) and screenwriter (Stir Crazy) Bruce Jay Friedman, Josh grew up in Glen Cove.

Normally surrounded by movie stars and writers, Josh and his younger brother Drew were the only white kids from 1962-66 at the otherwise all-black South School.

"I had a powerful civil rights conscience," says Bruce in the new documentary about Josh's life -- Blacks and Jews -- named after the title cut of the blues guitarist' s third album. "I kept pretending that there were two-or-three other semi-white kids."

In a telling scene, Josh says his mother Ginger, "I seem to recall that the first time Drew got beat up there, you said to dad, 'Get my kid the hell out of that shvartze school.' All of a sudden you weren't a liberal."

Ginger blanches. "Of course. Once we saw that your lives were in danger..."

In his unfinished autobiographical novel Black Cracker, Josh describes his nearly-fatal lynching at age eight by the friends and family of his classmates Jeffrey and Bobo:

"But I'm one of you, I'm a nigger, too." My words came out muffled with my face in the dirt.
"That's right, choke, go ahaid and choke!" came another voice from the pack. I saw someone's old-lady shoe kick me in the head.
"We want chu' to hate us!" came another voice.
A bucktoothed lady with a lisp added, "Thaths right, thucka, an we wanna kill yo' momma and yo' poppa and all yo' kind."

"I didn't know I was white until I was ten years old," says Josh in the documentary. "I've been obsessed with negroes ever since. It's a love/hate relationship. I feel like I was both damaged and enriched."

Josh tells me, "I had no awareness of Jewishness when I was a kid. I thought 'Jew' was just a dirty word you call someone. I thought it just meant 'you sonofabitch,' or 'you bastard.'"

Suffering from suicidal depression most of his life, Friedman "was heavily involved in drugs. I was smoking hash every morning in the boys' room. Between the ages of 13 and 16, I was stoned every day. I dropped out of highschool.

"I got busted right before my 16th birthday. In 1971, if you got busted for hash in Nassau County, that was a felony worth seven to fifteen years in prison. I went from having long hair to getting a crewcut for my trial. My parents got me a psychiatrist. I had a great lawyer. I got lucky. I got three years probation. I was scared straight by the police. They busted me three times, even when I was clean. They broke into the house and took me out in handcuffs in front of my mother.

"My depression is now under control due to the wonders of the Prozac generation."

As he chronicles in his book When Sex Was Dirty (Feral House, 2004), Josh went to work at Screw in 1980 after failing to land a writing job on Saturday Night Live. For the next five years, he reported on New York's sexual underworld:

Screw reporters were reimbursed or fronted petty cash for research in the field, like peeps and whorehouses. Screw's comptroller, Philip Eisenberg, was a Soviet-style bureaucrat who kept [publisher Al] Goldstein's tax ledgers neat as a Torah scroll. He was also in charge of expenses. When someone needed petty cash for undercover reviews, Philip counted it out as if he were donating blood. "Nothing more than a handjob," he'd soberly remind you.

Friedman says Jews dominate porn "because they were not allowed into banking and the oil industry."

After publishing his first book in 1986, Tales of Times Square (Feral House), Josh followed Peggy to Dallas, Texas.

"Having an upbeat happy vivacious wife helps to lift me up. I'll get into Heaven on her goodness. Then having [four-year-old daughter] Chloe, I'm totally involved in the world of little girls.

"Since my wife works full-time as a graphic designer, I take Chloe skating and to ballet. At Little Gym, I'll be the only father. There'll be 19 young mothers going around with their children. It's kinda hot!

"Going to PTA meetings and pie-baking contests and all these middle class clean wholesome American activities is really sexy to me. And to think I'm allowed in when I saw myself as practically like [author and drug addict] Charles Bukowski, living on the edge, but always getting to come back to a safe clean cocoon."

Several times a year, Josh visits New York with Peggy. They stay at great hotels thanks to her business account. "She's got fashionistas coming up to visit and I've got burned-out porn actors and ex-criminals."

In 2004, Josh returned to Glen Cove for the first time in 35 years and visited the housing projects around his old school. "I found some old men with wine bottles," Josh says in Blacks and Jews. "I took up a conversation with them. It turned out my friend/enemy Bobo had died of narcotics at about the age of 30. My friend Jeffrey died of narcotics about the age of 30. Everybody was dead or in jail. I didn't meet anybody who remembered me."

.......

I got a DVD of this feature-length documentary (Blacks and Jews: Josh Alan Friedman: A Life Obsessed With Negroes) by first-time director Kevin Page. The film is headed for the festival circuit looking to get picked up for broader distribution.

Josh Alan in his Screw days Josh today on Times Square Smut Peddler Al Goldstein, Jim Buckley, founders of Screw magazine Screw Screw Screw Josh Alan Raven De La Croix Josh, Raven on Midnight Blue Raven De La Croix Josh's wife Peggy Bennett Peggy Bennett Tales of Times Square Josh interviewed about his book in 1986 on Channel 11 in NYC Josh with a guy now on CNN Josh Alan in 1986

The film begins with Josh on the modern 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan. He says the word "Jews" rhymes with more words than any other word in the dictionary yet it is very rarely used in pop music.

Josh says he started writing for Screw November 22, 1976. His first published story was headlined "Schtupping A Spic."

Josh emails: "I didn't title it "Schtupping A Spic," they did, and I lost a close Puerto Rican friend because of that."

Standing on Times Square today, Josh says "it's all Japanese. It's all Disneyfied... It's retailtainment. That's the new pornography of Times Square."

Josh: "I would've been 21. My first publication came out. It was the only time my mother threw me out of the apartment and I went forlornly dejected down to Times Square with a Royal typewriter and a suitcase. I found myself a $5 flophouse [on 47th Street off Eighth Avenue]. I was thinking, this is where I belong. I went out late at night to the newsstand and copped a copy of Screw. And found my story [November 22, 1976 issue] that I had submitted months before. I was on cloud nine. I might've even killed myself if it wasn't for seeing my first published piece in Screw.

"Screw was started in 1968 by two renegade hippies -- Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley."

Jim appears in the 1971 film Mysteries of the Orgasm:

This is the first (and still the most) explicit appearance of an erect penis in a non-porn feature movie. Jim Buckley, the editor of Screw magazine, appears as himself getting a plaster mold made of his penis by sculptress Nancy Godfrey. He first takes off his pants and lies on the couch. Nancy then starts giving him a handjob until he achieves a full erection (telling him to close his eyes and think of something sexual). She then wraps his erect penis in plastic and applies the plaster. This is followed by a shot showing the mold being opened and the emergence of a copy of his penis made out of red plastic (which would make a very good weapon). The whole scene lasted around five minutes and left nothing to the imagination.

Josh: "It was the first underground sex newspaper of New York to show everything. Al Goldstein but a paid heavy price...but in his footsteps came the whole porn industry.

"The last thing I wanted to do was to write for Screw fulltime. I'd already been published in Penthouse and New York magazine. I had this lofty feeling that I was going up in the world. But I was broke and needed a job badly. Screw offered me one, beginning as associate editor. I took the job reluctantly. I felt depressed. I wanted to work at Saturday Night Live. I had been going to their meetings that year. There were a few people there trying to get me a job as a writer.

"My pieces would get picked up in Gent and Cavalier magazine because their editors were afraid to go into these places. I soon found out that going inside these sawdust floor scumatoriums was safer on the inside than it was on the street."

There's an excerpt from Al Goldstein's show Midnight Blue:

Josh: "Headling at the Melody Burlesque this week is Raven de la Croix. [Photos of Raven.] She ran off to live with bikers, to make X films. She's had a recording career.

"You've worked a lot on the Canadian circuit."

Raven: "That's where I started. After I had starred in my first film [Up!], I was in the music business as a record promoter before then, I was asked by Creative Directions, a California company, to write a screenplay [about strippers]. They liked my flair in writing, so they handed me a project.

"I got a phone call at the same time asking me to headline in Canada. I had never taken off my clothes in front of anybody... Then I figured I'd combinate the two, getting the material on strippers by performing in places and interviewing the girls and getting firsthand experience so I could write the star character in from a real point of view."

According to IMDB.com, Raven was born Lynn Christie Anna De La Croix on August 24, 1947.

Has worked as an actress, a stripper, a writer and a psychic. Is 3/4th Cherokee and French Indian.

Measurements: 42DD at the time of her burlesque career, now a 38D after reduction procedures. (Source: Celebrity Sleuth magazine)

Raven appeared in the 1976 Russ Meyer film Up! along with Kitten Natividad.

Josh replies to my question: "Of course I banged Raven, and thought she was totally charming, terrific, sincere and innocent."

Josh grew to love working at Screw. He met his wife and his best friend there -- Richard Jaccoma. "I quit smoking there. We all did.

"With a Screw press pass, I was able to get backstage anywhere and get treated like a prince in these Mob arenas.

"Most people assume that I left New York after [Tales of Times Square] was published because the Mob was after me. The Mob was not after me. They were not very pleased with the book."

Josh's brother Drew does not appear in the film. He doesn't like being interviewed, especially on camera.

Josh: "Our comic books were an attack on celebrity. It's a sickness throughout our culture."

Cartoonist Robert Crumb called Drew Friedman the "Robert Crumb of the '80s.

"Drew and I lived [the race question] in a way that few people have.

"Somebody coined us 'investigative cartoonists.'

"The sensation of laughing and being frightened is my favorite emotion entertainmentwise.

"Every time we had a comic strip, it seemed that a few months SCTV had a similar sketch with the same sort of non-sequitir style we had.

"Everybody thought it was Drew. I always felt like I didn't get any credit. He was the star. I would've liked to have kept doing comic strips.

"Drew had no interest in movies based on our cartoons. He believed in the anti-celebrity message. I would've loved to have done a Friedman Brothers movie but he didn't. That's why we broke up."

Josh's mom Ginger: "I wanted to be a professional artist too but I had children, one after the other after the other. I had done a lot of modeling. When you're constantly pregnant, you can't go out and audition. So I gave it all up. I've written three acting books. I've been teaching acting for quite a while."

Josh was an out-of-control kid. Drew was sedentary.

Josh wears sunglasses in the documentary, even at night. I thought he was a poseur, but he writes: "The sunglasses are prescription, more comfortable than regular glasses, and can't see well without 'em."

Josh: "As far as success goes, the parallel ends right there because he's had best-selling books, hit plays and hit movies. I ain't had that. I've had cult success. When my father was this age [48], he'd already hit the best-seller list and had a hit play and I'm still shlepping along. I think about that sometimes."

Bruce Jay Friedman: "My aspirations were to be a serious writer. I kept a strict separation between the magazines [Men, Man, For Men Only, True Action] and my 'serious work.'

"Our books had the name without the game. 'Nympho' was the word we'd use whenever sales were slow. They weren't terribly sexy but there was a little promise of it. Gradually they got nakeder and nakeder.

"I didn't write any of those stories. I was preserving that time to do something you could argue was better.

"If I had been working at Time/Life, writing Time/Life stories, I doubt seriously whether I could've written fiction. The records show that few people from Time/Life over these many years have ever done the kind of thing that I do, that Mario [Puzo] did, and George Fox did and so many others [who worked for these men's magazines]."

I see an article in one of Bruce's magazines entitled "A Gentleman's Guide To Girl Pinching." It was by the late A. C. Spectorsky.

Ginger Friedman: "We were very social. We were out at Elaine's every night. It was terrible. I should've been a better mother. I just wanted to go out and have fun. So did Bruce. He wrote every night. We saw every Broadway show. We saw every off-Broadway show. Every movie. Parties."

Bruce: "I don't think anybody in the history of Hollywood had more fun than I had. Every time I got out there I felt like I was turned loose in an adult candy store."

Josh's parents say they would've preferred him to write for The New Yorker rather than Screw. "I suppose I should've been upset, but I really wasn't," says Bruce.

Adam Parfrey writes in his superb 2003 book It's A Man's World:

Speaking to the several extant writers and editors of the men's adventure magazine genre, I was surprised by how little they were aware that their publications put across themes that might be interpreted as being racist, misogynist, imperialist, or any other postmodern academic construct today.

"That was the way things were," said Bruce Jay Friedman, editor of several Man's Management Publications. "We didn't think twice about it."

Most scribes laboring for Martin Goodman's Magazine Management firm and other repositories of adventure magazines spoke of feeling like well-compensated slaves of a very particular style ["man triumphant] that was not their own.

This was not the style with which editor Bruce Jay Friedman felt most comfortable, and when editing publications for Martin Goodman he unsuccessfully tried to talk him out of running advertisements for trusses, an ad signalling the magazine's target audience: blue-collar yahoos. It would be years before he could raise his head at industry cocktail parties, when his acclaimed examples of "black humor fiction" were seen as appropriate material for a hipper, more monied crowd.

Bruce Jay Friedman writes in It's A Man's World:

Would-be masturbators were made to settle for a few lubricious crumbs. "Throw 'em a few hot words," was Martin Goodman's edict when a nervous editors uggested heating things up a bit for sales. These were along the lines of "heaving breasts," "long shapely legs," "a flash of pink panties." It may be that a "dark triangle" or two slipped by, but I rather doubt it. In the pictorial division, each magazine ran a set of pictures of young women in bathing suits throwing haughty looks over their shoulders. The famed Magazine Management retoucher was Murray Shapiro, whose coveted job it was to airbrush out nipple aerolas and pubic hair strands on photos of cheesecake models who had been careless during shooting sessions. There is no record that a single areola or strand ever slipped past his eagle eye and made its way to the newsstand. (From the look Stag took on in the late '70s, one gathers that Shapiro had undergone a wild career change, spending his hours dabbing back in strands quite similar to the ones he spent so much time erasing.)

Josh turns to his mother: "You didn't want me to name my album 'Blacks and Jews.'"

Ginger: "I was afraid for you. I was afraid somebody would come after you.

"I had a relationship for several years with a wonderful black man who the boys loved."

There's a ridiculous video of Josh wearing his sunglasses, a yarmulke and a prayer shawl playing his guitar and singing his song Blacks and Jews at Temple Shearith Israel before 8-12th graders.

Josh: "I had no awareness of Jewishness when I was a kid. My father was bar mitzvahed and grew up in a whole different era when anti-Semitism was prominent in America. I thought 'Jew' was just a dirty word you call someone. I thought it just meant 'you sonofabitch,' or 'you bastard.' I had no Jewish consciousness other than the showbusiness consciousness."

Bruce: "In the 1950s, there weren't any people with Jewish names who had careers as writers. You changed your name. Irwin Shaw wasn't Irwin Shaw. There were a few. Henry Roth. A lot of them wrote that early book and went out to Hollywood."

Josh talks about the story he wrote in highschool -- "Black Cracker" -- about his experience as the only white kid at an all-black school in Glen Cove, Long Island. "To this day I haven't gotten a solid answer from my parents about what I was doing there."

Ginger: "You caused a lot of trouble in that school, not them. You were a bad boy. I didn't want to send you there. Dad and I fought about that. He said, I thought you were a liberal. I said, yes, I am, but I don't want my kids to go to that school..."

Bruce: "I was lax about it and irresponsible. It was probably a bitch. It was an era when men took care of the big picture... and women took care of the small stuff like where you send your kids to school."

Josh: "I didn't know I was white until I was ten years old.

"Drew went to the school for two years."

Bruce shakes his head. "I didn't realize that."

Josh: "I've been obsessed with negroes ever since."

Bruce: "I had a powerful civil rights conscience. I kept pretending that there were two-or-three other semi-white kids... There was something morally wrong with switching on that basis."

Josh: "I seem to recall that the first time Drew got beat up there, dad said, 'Get my kid the hell out of that shvartze school.' All of a sudden you weren't a liberal."

Ginger: "Of course. Once we saw that your lives were in danger..."

Josh eventually published the story Black Cracker in Penthouse in 1978. A young black female editor quit in protest.

Josh: "I'm constantly living in the past in my head. I have my own vision of New York. I don't like the world the way it is right now so I live in a fantasy world of my own imagining that I'm in New York 50 years ago.

"I saw a reflection of [Josh's family's life] coming out in my father's work on stage and in fiction... My father kept a strict definition of what he did as fiction but it didn't always read that way. Likewise, Chloe will see that her father wrote books with titles like When Sex Was Dirty. You just can't worry about what your parents or children will think about the controversy of your work or you will be frozen."

In the film's final act, Josh reads for 17-minutes (about the time he was almost lynched at age eight by the family and friends of his classmates) from his unpublished unfinished novel Black Cracker. He may turn it into a memoir a la Angela's Ashes.

Josh emails: "I definitely was when I was about 8. However, the book chapter is more a composite of numerous trips to "the colored section." Impossible to relate incidents from 40 years ago exactly as they happened because the imagination plays tricks and you dream about it over the decades. That's why I want to present it as a novel."

At the end of the documentary, Josh returns to Glen Cove and finds out that the black kids he went to school with are either dead or in prison. Nobody remembers him.

When Sex Was Dirty

I called author Josh Alan Friedman, 48, Sunday, January 30, 2005 to talk about his new book.

My only chat with Josh was in July of 2001. We also exchanged email about the whereabouts of Nancy Suiter.

Josh: "I've had other [articles and books] I've tried to publish and they won't even look at it unless it is on sex. That, they'll look at it. I hate the whole process of trying to sell a book. I have a music book that I think is much better. It's a collection of music pieces I've done for many years.

"Then I had this novel called Black Cracker. I think it is going to be a big hardcover in the next year or two. I've been working on it all my life. It's my own childhood story.

"Some of it is related in this new movie called Blacks and Jews, which is a documentary about my life by Dallas filmmaker Kevin Page. He showed me that I have a life story. We all do. I learned a lot about myself. I opened up the archives. He made a story out of my life, like an insect under the microscope. Not the least of it was a half hour of Times Square footage. Me at Show World 25-years ago when I was on Midnight Blue (Al Goldstein's public access TV show). Raven de la Croix is in it. Me hanging out at the Melody Burlesque when I was young and handsome.

"Then there's a half hour on my brother Drew, 45, and I. We were the most feared cartoonists in New York (from the late '70s to 1987).

"My father Bruce Jay [Friedman], 74, speaks a lot about how Drew and I came to become whatever we are [cult figures].

"The last part of the film is about the colored schools. Drew and I were the only white kids in an all-black school [from 1962-66, grade one through four]. Thus the title Black Cracker. The end of the film is trying to find out why I was sent there.

"Not that there are any complaints. I wouldn't have it any other way. But it was the Civil Rights era, when things were at their craziest.

"I lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood [Glen Cove] with a successful father, a writer, surrounded by movie stars and writers, and yet I went to a poor ghetto school, the only one of its kind in Long Island.

"They did teach me to read and say the alphabet.

"The film is playing film festivals this year until we hope it goes into general release or cable television. It's named after the title cut of my third album."

Luke: "How did you come to put together this book?"

Josh: "You had a lot to do with it. Do you remember you reprinted The Stud, which was originally in Hustler? I digitized it into the computer, brushed it up, and it went on your website [l-keford.com]. I was talking to you right before you left about the next chapter, The Strikeout King [about Jeff Goodman aka Sammy Grubman]. I was going to use you as my impetus to go forward. I started it and would've given it to you to debut it on there.

"After I did that, I just kept going. Feral House made me change everything into first-person non-fiction. I would've preferred to keep some of it as a short story, but if you don't present something as non-fiction, you don't get published. Since Woodward & Bernstein, non-fiction reigns. I've not been able to get things published my way. It's a thin line between fiction and non-fiction. We call it non-fiction here.

"Some of the pieces are straight-journalism, like the Rise and Fall of Al Goldstein. Just the facts, mam. Other pieces read like short stories."

Luke: "Are there any other composite characters aside from Stephanie Mason [a composite of Dian Hanson's good side, says Josh, and Tracy Quan]?"

Josh: "Probably not. Just poor Dian. They left a whole chapter out.

"I agree with you about all the typos.

"I got the galleys to When Sex Was Dirty, which I had been begging for for months, the same afternoon (by Fed-Ex) that that morning I had received a full box of finished books.

"In one caption under Al Goldstein it says, 'Pride of the Yankees.' It's 'Pride of the Yankers.' There's a lot of things like that that killed me.

"Feral House has assured me that the second printing will be able to correct everything.

"The chapter that disappeared was about Ronnie Spector (a famous rock n'roll singer of the early '60s). Again, something I would've much preferred to have called a short story, but as it happens, it is all true. I changed it back to the real names. It's the first kiss-and-tell I've ever written. She's Phil Spector's first wife. When I was young and handsome, I went out with her. It was a horrible relationship.

"Feral House assures me they never saw it and it will be in the second printing."

Luke: "You wrote Meg Calendar lost a nostril?"

Josh: "I changed that. I think it was a finger that was cut off. Again, I'm trying to disguise that."

Luke: "But a finger and a nostril would make a dramatic difference in looks?"

Josh: "Yes. Originally I wanted to present it as a short story, but I couldn't.

"Tales of Times Square [Josh's 1986 book] is being made into an independent film by Paul Stone of Firebrand Films in New York."

Luke: "Who was the porn star 'Elsa Kay'?"

Josh: "She was based on Lisa Be, a porn star in the early '80s."

In the chapter "Write & Fight," Josh tells the story of ornery writer "Pete LeSand" who supposedly hooked up with Lisa Be and fled to Alaska to get away from the Mob. Josh and "Pete" worked together on Soho News, which Josh calls "New York Dirt" in this chapter.

Pete and Lisa (Elsa Kay) went their separate ways quickly but both are alive and well.

Luke: "I loved the chapter 'The Man Who Loved Slut Dancing.'

It's about Josh and his friend confessing which stars launched their loads.

Josh: "I'd be in trouble if I revealed him. His younger sister became a movie star and started appearing nude in all of her films, and all of a sudden, what tortured him came back to him full in the face, and he had to learn to sit there with his parents and see each of her films.

"Before she became a star, his sister was in a [1982] play off-Broadway with Farrah Fawcett. And Farrah was the lead. Jeff would go to see the play every week because Farrah played a rape victim and she strutted about the stage without wearing panties. By sitting in the first row, Jeff could look right up her snatch. When the lights were right, she would open up her dress, and he had the perfect seat where he could see. And he was cumming in his pants. Yet, there was his sister on stage.

"I should leave his name out because he's already humiliated that I would do such a thing. He won't talk to me.

"His sister hadn't done her nude scenes yet and he was very protective of his little sister. Next thing he knows, the whole world is beating off to her nude scenes. It was a karmic payback."

Luke: "Now they've got MrSkin.com, which is pure cocaine to those who are vulnerable to [celebrity nudity]."

Josh: "Do actresses know that every split-second scene of nudity is going to be immortalized for masturbators. Mr Skin has an encyclopedic book. He has freeze-frame and blow-up. We didn't have any clue that this stuff would come out."

Luke: "They make it too easy now."

Josh: "You really had to work towards it when you were a kid. You had to know exactly when the moment was coming up. You had to be ready. Many a time it would just be ruined by a commercial."

Luke: "Did Jeff go on to a happy marriage with Judy [the anthropologist daughter of Holocaust survivors]?"

Josh: "They divorced. Jeff was hilarious but he was never able to translate that as a writer/comedian."

Luke: "What's he doing now?"

Josh: "I don't know. He's pissed off at me. Rightfully so. There are two people I've burned bridges with -- Dian Hanson (I think she's best men's magazine editor ever) and Jeff."

Luke: "I remember what a thrill it was to get a little tit on television in the late '70s, early '80s. PBS. Independent stations showing movies or Benny Hill."

Josh: "If I would've seen a tit in the '60s when I was in my young teens, I would've fainted. It was unthinkable. The first tits seen on stage in theater was in my father's play Scuba Duba, which ran nearly four years starting 1967. It was first play on New York stage to have four-letter words and tits, months before Hair. Big shock value back then. Starred Jerry Orbach, Conrad Bain, Judd Hirsch, Cleavon Little.

"The first [white] tits officially unveiled on [public] TV were a few years later [in 1973] on Steambath. It had Valerie Perrine naked."

Bruce Jay Friedman wrote Steambath.

Josh: "Right after that was a version of Caligula that had some nudity in it."

Luke: "Public TV was great. They'd show Masterpiece Theatre with some BBC show and that would have some tits."

Josh: "My family has a history of breaking barriers like that. Dirty words on stage and nudity."

Luke: "What did your father say to you about your [writing about porn]?"

Josh: "He couldn't say very much. Both he and my mother would've preferred that I was at The New Yorker. But he had his own experience being an editor at some hush-hush unmentionable magazines back in the '50s. For twelve years, he was the editor of Male, Man, True Action, Man's World, as well as the original Swank. You weren't allowed to mention that at parties. When he was asked, what do you do? He would say, I'm in publishing. What kind of publishing? Magazines. Magazines? What kind? Mens magazines.

"It would be like the noose closing around the neck. What kind of mens magazines? You mean adventure? Well, yeah. You mean True, Odyssey? Well, no. They're called, Man. Oh, hahahaha. Do you get to screw those broads?

"It was the bottom of the totem pole in publishing compared to Time/Life/Knopf. He went through his own version of that and he certainly was in no position to tell me, Josh, I wish you weren't there.

"We all thought Al Goldstein was the funniest guy in the world. Back then. Nobody could put you on the floor like Al Goldstein. Nobody since Jerry Lewis made me laugh so hard than Goldstein in the original years at Screw. You can see that if you ever see his 'F--- you' editorial in Midnight Blue. He's a walking caricature of anti-Semitism. Fat, with a cigar out of his mouth, talking about how at the moment of orgasm he starts thinking about Pastrami King on 47th Street.

"For me, Screw was the heir apparent to Mad magazine. It was truly outrageous and cutting edge. The interviews in Screw in those years every week were people such as John Lennon, Jack Nicholson, Sammy Davis Jr.

"Every week in the editorial meetings, Al would have different guests such as Melvin van Peebles, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Cosby, Philip Roth. There would always be surprising guests in our editorial meetings just quietly observing. They knew you were something special even though the rest of the world would look at you as the lowest of the low. We thought [Screw] was a magical place."

Luke: "What did you think of the documentary Screwed (1996)?"

Josh: "It was terrible. It gave you no semblance of what Screw was about or what Goldstein was really like. I didn't recognize anything in that as being Screw or Al Goldstein."

Luke: "Maybe they had both changed [since Josh left New York in 1987]?"

Josh: "It wasn't done too long after I knew them. Goldstein is a multi-faceted man. He's not merely just a gross pig. They emphasized the masturbation porn-obsessive side of Screw in the grungiest way when Screw had many other sides.

"Any time Al took me out to dinner, it was always to exquisite restaurants with beautiful women. He was well-dressed and a mannered cultured guy who just happens to be the clown prince of pornography on the side."

Luke: "The magazine certainly went to hell [some time in the 1980s]."

Josh: "It went to hell while I was there. When Manny Neuhaus became editor, it completely fell apart."

Luke: "How so?"

Josh: "He was an administrator. He came right after Richard Jaccoma [previous editor]. We had a blowup in the office where Richard quit. Then I felt an obligation to quit because my best friend Richard quit. I quit for a few days. By the time I came back, all of a sudden, Manny Neuhaus was installed as managing editor."

Luke: "Manny quit in 1999."

Josh: "He was fired. Al fires everybody. Manny didn't give a s--- about writing or ideas or taking chances. I saw Screw as a place where you could write about stuff nobody else in the world was writing about. You could send guys out on assignment to do the toilets of New York. You could do a fake interview with Albert Speer. Gil Reavill did a great one that everyone believed. Hitler's architect was still alive then.

"With Manny coming in, it became rehashed cliches. Films being written about like in crayon. The type of articles he'd assign became moronic. Goldstein began to see it as a weekly budgetary thing. Let's keep those hooker ads coming. He made lots of money because he invented the market for hooker ads. He took the busts and went to jail for it and he earned it.

"You had $50,000-80,000 worth of hooker ads in there every week.

"I stayed in touch with Al once a year after I left. There'd be a letter or phone call and one or two dinners.

"I wanted to find Al for my December 3rd party for my book and film. I get into New York and get a call from Shark. He says, 'Josh, you know I can't make it to your party. I'm thrilled about the book.' Someone read him some paragraphs from it. He's tickled. He loves me. He says, 'Josh, I want to fix you up with a date.' I said, I'm happily married. I don't do that.

"He says no, it means a lot to me. Jeff Goodman had told me over the phone, you've got to let him fix you up. He lives to do something like this. You'll keep him alive another year or two.

"I said all right. What's her name? He said, 25 Russian models. I said, can you cut it down to 12?

"He sent me 25 Russian models to be my date. I had to be writing down all these names for the guest list upfront. About half of them showed up.

"Shark told me, during the party, you will be their shepherd. After the party, you will be their wolf.

"Instead of being a wolf, I decided at the end of the night, I've got a whole team here. Let's go out and canvas all the homeless shelters to find Al Goldstein. We all had cell phones. We went in squadrons to different shelters. I ended up on Wards Island at 3am. It's a scary place. It's like Night of the Living Dead. It's under the Triborough Bridge.

"We couldn't find Al Goldstein anywhere. They don't tell you at the entrance. Guards aren't allowed to reveal names. But we had people go upstairs and look around for an old fat bearded Jew pornographer.

"I got home from New York. Ratso Sloman told me he had just found Goldstein a home on Staten Island in a flophouse and a job at a bagel factory.

"I can see Al's life story going up $100,000 a week. Now he's putting holes in bagels. Al is writing his downfall in this Shakespearian tragedy of his life as if it is being bid on by Warner Brothers and Paramount. It makes for a great story but a terrible life."

Luke: "I think he'd rather have the attention and be in the gutter."

Josh: "Of course."

In 1987, Josh followed the love of his life, Peggy Bennett, to Dallas, Texas. "I put my guitar career into full-blast once I got down here. I've had four albums out. I've toured the South West many times. I played for Kinky Friedman many times. He's no relation.

"I have a four-year-old daughter. Once Chloe was born, I stopped traveling.

"I wrote about 25 features (music pieces) for the Dallas Observer."

Luke: "Was that the right decision [to put music first]?"

Josh: "Yes. Music has always come first for me. It's 51% guitar and 49% writing. I didn't plan on being a writer. As I became fascinated with Times Square, I stopped playing. But I always felt a great sadness that I had let the guitar slip out of my hands in New York.

"I did not come to Texas to play music but I quickly became booked all around.

"I'm having a helluva time with this book When Sex Was Dirty. No bookstores are carrying it. Part of the Feral House curse. At least here in Dallas, stores prefer not to have that title looking at people. It was supposed to be hardcover. You take it for granted that they are not going to allow typos in there."

Luke: "Has your time writing on the sex industry come back to haunt you?"

Josh: "It hasn't hurt me because I'm not trying to get in somewhere. I wrote a piece for Texas Monthly, which is conservative. I'm not seeking work at places that might look down at me for my past. I'm proud of everything that I did that is sex-related. I always felt forced into that ghetto of mens magazines. I couldn't publish anywhere else.

"It would be nice to be a New Yorker writer or to have a monthly column in Esquire in the 1980s. You mention the immorality that coincides with the typos. To write about immorality does not mean you are immoral. You are uncovering something. The world of Jeff Goodman is a two-sided sword. Here's this guy attempting to 'exploit' thousands of women. Yet he goes to bed alone every night and has to bomb himself out with codeine pills. Lots of the women he's chasing after have lots of guys chasing after them too and can have their pick of the litter. Who's the victim and who's the shark? Who's got the power? The rich guys chasing after the models or the models who can fling them off like so much flotsam and jetsam?

"Jeff Goodman is the worst example of a men's magazine slave driver, getting women naked [and trying to sleep with them]. Yet he's getting the raw end of the deal. He's the one who suffers the most.

"Jeff has a really good thing going now. He's remodeled his face. He's got lots of asian girlfriends."

Luke: "He's been married for two years."

Josh: "Yep. He's married to one plus he's still... It was a bad stretch for him. His whole youth was a bad stretch."

Luke: "He denies that he's in mail fraud. He says he's a copywriter."

Josh: "Well, then he's a copywriter. We're not trying to bust him on whatever he's doing. Sure, he's a copywriter now."

Luke: "He denies he's ever been sued for an underage [issue]."

Josh: "Well, I'm sure he's right about that too. We can't lay out everyone's dirty laundry completely. That's why we changed names here [to Sammy Grubman]. What are we going to do? Get him arrested? Open up an old lawsuit? I stick by whatever he says."

I laugh.

Josh: "We're talking about a short story here where things are changed. It's based on someone but we change all kinds of details like that."

Luke: "What sort of toll did porn take [on its models]?"

Josh: "Everybody pays a different toll. You get a sense with the best porn actresses, the reason that they are so popular when they first begin, is that they exude an image of being violated. Ginger Lynn, Veronica Hart, Christy Canyon, Jenna Jameson in their first scenes, you get the sense that here is a young lady who wasn't quite sure what she was getting into. She was in a little over her head and now her eyes are bugging out and she's choking on somebody's cock onscreen and she looks like she has a sense of being violated. She's not used to this yet. The so-called fans, I call them masturbators, get a great sense of the violation of a young girl. Then the girls get hardened and it becomes their daily job."

Luke: "Do you suffer from professional jealousy?"

Josh: "In music, but not in writing."

Luke: "Who most influenced your writing style?"

Josh: "Terry Southern and Bruce Jay Friedman and Nelson Algren.

"I'm not in my father's category, by any means. Not by a hundredth. But I suppose that some tradition continues with me and my brother Drew."

Drew and Josh haven't collaborated in 15 years. "I don't talk to him much. A couple of times a year. Sometimes people will call me for his number. For months I didn't have his phone number. I had some angry art directors who assumed I was eight-balling them."

Luke: "Why would your dad be in an obituary of Mario Puzo?"

Josh: "They were best friends. My dad hired him at Magazine Management in 1959. They worked together for about nine years there."

Luke: "Have you always been a happy person?"

Josh: "No. I've suffered from major depression most of my life. Suicidal depression. I've battled it. I wanted to be happy and I was almost happy. I had both a fantastic and a terrible childhood. I realized years later, now that there's a name for it and that there are medications for it, that the terrible part of my childhood resulted from fighting against depression. Not even knowing what it was. Just this overwhelming sadness for no particular reason, which we now know is bio-chemical.

"When I was a young teenager, I was heavily involved in drugs. I was smoking hash every morning in the boys' room at school and tripping and going through the whole whatever-there-is-to-take-I-took it with the crowd I hung with. Between the ages of 13 and 16, I was stoned every day. I dropped out of highschool.

"I got busted right before my 16th birthday. In 1971, if you got busted for hash in Nassau County, that was a felony worth 7-15 years in prison. I went from having longhair to getting a crewcut for my trial. My parents got me a psychiatrist. I had a great lawyer. I got lucky. I got three years probation. I was scared straight by the police. They busted me three times, even when I was clean. They broke into the house and took me out in handcuffs in front of my mother.

"My depression is now under control due to the wonders of the Prozac generation. It's like getting your life back."

Luke: "Did medication have any effect on you writing?"

Josh: "No. It doesn't make you happy. It keeps you up to C-level. It prevents you from drowning."

Peggy and Josh have been together 23 years. "I like to credit the years for time served. We officially got married in 1989."

Luke: "How has being a husband and a father affected you?"

Josh: "I love it. Being a husband has been a grounding thing. Having an upbeat happy vivacious wife helps to lift me up. I'll get into Heaven on her goodness. She's so good down to the core. Then having Chloe... I'm totally involved in the world of little girls. I know about Madam Alexander Dolls and Barbies and 150 children's books and nursery rhyme songs that I sing at her nursery school. The world of little girls is fascinating. I know it sounds devious to say that coming from an ex-pornographer but as we know people who are pornographers with adults have no [sexual] interest in children.

"Since my wife works fulltime (graphic designer), I take Chloe skating and to ballet. I'm the only guy when we have daytime get-togethers. I do carpool at the nursery school. At little gym, I'll be the only father. There'll be 19 young mothers going around with their children. It's kinda hot! I'm that much older than the mothers.

"Going to PTA meetings and pie-baking contests and all these middle class clean wholesome American activities is really sexy to me. And to think I'm allowed in when I saw myself as practically like [author and drug addict] Charles Bukowski, living on the edge, but always getting to come back to a safe clean cocoon. We have a beautiful house.

"For a number of years in Dallas, I still went out late at night and hung out with pimps and hookers and drug addicts. But I got to come home to a nice world while they stay living in the dope house. I wonder if I'm slumming? I'm not slumming. I live in both worlds.

"We go to New York four or five times a year. We stay at great hotels under my wife's business account. I feel like we are Nick and Nora Charles. The Thin Man series. ["Comedy-mystery featuring Nick and Nora Charles: a former detective and his rich, playful wife.']

"She's got fashionistas coming up to visit and I've got Uncle Lou coming up. Burned-out porn actors and ex-criminals. We mix and match well."

Luke: "How do you like being Jewish?"

Josh: "I never considered being Jewish until the Pete LeSand character used to shame me for not going to JDL (Jewish Defense League) meetings and warning me that the second Holocaust was right around the corner unless I got out there and raised my fists. For a moment there, without knowing anything about my own Jewish background religionwise, I'm more showbiz Jewish, I went to some JDL meetings and thought this is how I am going to be introduced to the Jewish religion and become an active member. I've got to go out and protect graveyards at Halloween and beat up Puerto Ricans.

"Then I figured, nah, it's just not for me. I suppose I'm glad they're there. I remained friends with a few of those guys.

"Pete LeSand was in the JDL.

"I was not bar mitzvahed."

Luke: "Have you suffered anti-Semitism?"

Josh: "No. Certainly not in Texas. They caught a couple of skinheads in Dallas defacing a synagogue and they were given ten years [in prison]. The skinheads put bullet holes in the synagogues and swastikas over everything. They just won't tolerate it in Texas.

"I have one Jewish friend in Texas -- Bernie the Mohel (circumsizer). Dallas is only a one-mohel-town as Bernie found out as he became the second mohel. He didn't get enough gigs so he went into the container business. He's a big blues fan and he comes to all my gigs. He's Orthodox. I saw a Tyson fight at his home. There were twelve rabbis and me sitting around eating Hebrew National hotdogs. It was interesting to get the rabbinical take on Tyson.

"One night at the Winedale, there was something you could call anti-Semitism. One drunk cowboy stood up and said, this is what I think of the Jews. 'Every one of them should have their throats cut. F--- the Jews.'

"It happened to be a night when Bernie the Mohel was there. He happens to be an ex-member of the Israeli Defense Force and is a superb fighter.

"After I played my song, 'Blacks and Jews,' the guy stood up and screamed, 'Kill the Jews.' Bernie looked at me and I looked at him and we both froze. We decided to give the guy one more chance.

"The cowboy's friends immediately picked him up by each elbow and hustled him right out of there. They said to him, 'You just can't say things like that.'

"Bernie and I let out a sigh. That was the only incident that could be considered anti-Semitic that I've encountered in 17 years in Texas."

Luke: "Did your parents give you a hard time about marrying someone who is not Jewish?"

Josh: "Not at all. They just loved her."

Luke: "Why are there so many Jews in porn?"

Josh: "You know that answer better than me. You can't say it was because they were not allowed to become the Rockefellers of banking, so they got into pornography.

"That's my answer. Because they were not allowed into banking and the oil industry and were forced to work in porn. Money lending and porn were all that were available.

"You're doing a helluva job with your new site. It reads like a Talmud scroll. I went over to your Jewish site. God is suddenly G-d."

We chat about former Screw journalist Mark Kramer who first introduced me to Josh in 2001. "He came [to New York] from Dallas," says Josh, "about the same time I left New York. Jew for Jew.

"I love it here. Kramer never felt like this was his home.

"The first month [in Dallas] I had a nervous breakdown. After that, it was great.

"I didn't want to come down here at all. I had to come. Peggy moved first. She stopped taking my calls. I bottomed out. I didn't have any money. Whatever it took, by any means necessary, I moved to Dallas."

Tracy Quan Interview

People lie to carve out privacy, to make someone happy, to maintain an upper hand. Prostitutes often lie to their boyfriends but so do many other people. Now, some people assume that there is an authentic self, a person you "truly are," hiding behind the public image. I think that's naïve. You can minimize one aspect of yourself in order to play up another.

Pros and cons? If you are a prostitute, you learn to be versatile. But if you are too versatile and you get found out, you may be accused of dishonesty or moral turpitude.

There is NO job or lifestyle I recommend because every path involves risk or pain, but there will always be people who are attracted to the prostitute's way of life, whether you condone or discourage [it]. The call girl is like other people but she is also in a category of her own. Aren't all professions a bit distinct or different?

Photos From Jeff Goodman

Pictures of Stephanie Lee AKA Tracy Quan circa 1976-1978 Tracy with Richard Jaccoma

Cartoonist Marnin Rosenberg at the Josh Friendman book party in New York in December 2004

Author Tim Beckley in a blue jacket and an aged Jaccoma at the party. Shark girl.

Myron Fass Myron Fass Myron published this comic book

The filmmaker Kevin Page at the post-party Indian restaurant.

Josh Friedman with Marnin Rosenberg, whom he immortalized in a comic book a long time ago.

Jeff Goodman circa 1976 with his girlfriend. Jeff at age 25.

Josh Alan at the party. Josh with his dad Bruce Jay Friedman.

Isabelle Fortea, the girl that almost did in Jeff Goodman. Isabelle. Isabelle. 1994.

Jeff Goodman says:

I got her to pay back about 80% of the money she took from me, and I agreed never to contact her again. She "dated" Paul Borghese, Jean Claude Van Dam, about 1000 other guys in NYC. I saw her walking in the street about a year ago. She had aged, her hair was dyed black, and she was down to about 80lbs due to insane vegan diet. I heard she was a dominatrix in Europe for an agency. She looked like hell. At one point she was probably one of the best looking women in New York. She did know what she was doing in bed.

Timmy Secor, "The Shark" doing a "model" interview. Timmy, model.

Josh, Kevin Page.

Josh interviewing Tiny Tim in 1983 for OUI magazine when Jeff was the publisher/editor. Josh, Tiny Tim.

Josh in 2004. Josh performing in NYC, 2001.

One of Jeff's pre-marriage imported Japanese girlfriends, Polaroids by Warren Tang. Miki again.

Jeff's girlfriend of five years who died in the tsunami that swept through Phuketa. Jareeta Jareeta Jareeta Jareeta

Jeff writes: The first nude photos ever taken of Hyapatia Lee. Taken by me at the Indiana nudist camp where I first saw her.

Jeff with Bebe Buell, playboy playmate, mother of Liv Tyler.

Jeff Goodman Interview

Jeff Goodman aka Sammy Grubman (about 50yo) calls me Sunday. He pioneered phone sex for Carl Ruderman in 1983 and edited many sex magazines.

Luke: "How old is your wife?"

Jeff: "Twenty seven. A Japanese girl. A very nice girl. Married for about three years. She doesn't have any idea about any of this stuff. As far as she knows, and it is true, I am a very nice loving husband who would never do anything strange."

Luke: "Josh portrays you as the strike-out king."

Jeff: "That was true. We were hanging out at Studio 54 and I was organizing all these photo shoots. We would sit there and look at the merchandise. Once in a while, we'd try to talk to these girls. We gave off this aura of futility.

"While Josh's book is amusing and I like it quite a bit, he makes more of a cartoon portrait of me. In reality, I was only striking out for a miserable year and a half long period. My fortunes considerably improved post "Studio 54"."

Luke: "Are you still in mail-order?"

Jeff: "I am successfully copywriting and other things. I have nothing to do with porn. I have more lucrative lines of work.

"Have you looked at the Badmags.com website? This guy [Tom Brinkmann] has an encyclopedic knowledge of the cult magazine industry from the '70s. He's an avid collector of pulp and porn. He knows more things about me and Myron Fass [sex mag publisher pictured with a young Al Goldstein] than I remember.

"I've been helping him copy-edit his book.

"I told him it was too bad he never walked up to Countrywide because I would've hired him on the spot.

"I invented 900-numbers. Carl Ruderman became wealthy. All those guys who got in trouble, such as Bruce Chew, piggybacked on my idea. I didn't get a dime from it. I was ripped out of everything by Ruderman.

"I feel bad about [deposed porn mag publishers] Bob Guccione and Al Goldstein. I would almost start a fund to help them.

"A few months ago, I was walking through the subway. I go to the fleamarket on weekends. This horrible cracked-up bum comes to me. He was dressed in Salvation Army rags. He was smelly. He said, 'Hello, Jeff.' I was scared. I couldn't put it together.

"It dawned on me later that it was Goldstein."

Luke: "Panhandling?"

Jeff: "Worse. He looked unbelievable. You would never recognize him as anything resembling a human being. I didn't answer him. I just walked away quickly. After I walked away, it dawned on my clearly who it was."

Luke: "Did you meet your wife through your thing where you introduced Japanese women to New York?"

Jeff: "Yes. I met her online.

"When I was doing this full-force, like three or four years ago, there weren't that many girls online. Now there are hundreds of thousands. You can log on to ICQ and search for random girls online. Japan or Thailand or wherever you want to go. They talk. You exchange pictures and they want to come here. I had so many girls coming and going it was unbelievable. I'd drop one off for airport departures and then I'd had to race upstairs because another one was coming in from Japan in 20 minutes. I had 300 girls coming and going from Japan."

Luke: "How did you come to marry this one?"

Jeff: "She was just a very nice girl. She was crazy about me. I don't even understand why. I figured I'm not 25 anymore. I can't go on with this endlessly. I'll be one of these 70yo guys with a dribble cup. You realize that the Shark was Timmy Secora. He's a paraplegic who runs Star Models. He's been doing this for 40 years. He was on the college hockey team with John Kerry."

Luke: "Why did the Stud, Mike Florio, wind up in a mental hospital?"

Jeff chuckles: "Too many girls."

'Meg Calendar' Is Meg Register

Josh Alan Friedman writes in his new book When Sex Was Dirty:

Meg Calender was the crown jewel in Shark's stable [Star Models in New York]. "Boner City," said Sammy [Jeff Goodman], leafing through her portfolio, wincing in pain. An absolute 10, she made the rest of Shark's stable resemble, in Sammy's estimation, "a pig sty." She was a Ford model who maintained some mysterious allegiance to Shark from her early days. Meg still sought Shark's career advice, perhaps out of pity. Somehow, Shark procured Meg a small part in a Miami Vice episode, along with bikini walk-ons in a few Hollywood movies. He kept her Ford Agency portfolio front and center on his desk.

I skimmed through it. Every pose was haughty, superior, sophisticated. Height 5'8", size 8, bust 34D, waist 24, hips 34. She had a blonde mane teased around her forehead like a lion. But apparently Meg Calendar was too cold for anybody to like. Too fabulous for her own good. The only thing people viewed her as was a goddess. Shark showed a clipping of her from last week's Post, posing with Fabio, her male counterpart, at the Palladium.

"When I first saw her I turned my head away," Grubman confessed, "'cause I knew I'd feel deprived for the rest of my life. Why go on living? When I see her pictures, I know I'll feel sick for years for not being able to get her."

..........

Shark got Meg Calendar a double episode on some cop show from an old friend [Fred Dryer?], an ex-NFL player who co-produced and appeared in the series [Hunter?]. The football player took her on a weekend climbing excursion in the Valencia Mountains. The guy had a pet chimp who went everywhere with him, even mountain climbing.... At the end of the trip, as Meg was leaving, she reached over to pat the chimp on the head and it bit off one of her nostrils. One savage crunch.... Ruined for modeling...

"Meg Register seen walking out a room and sitting on a railing while topless, and then seen completely nude from behind as she sits on a bench. Hi-res DVD capture from Boxing Helena."

Tracy Quan's Diary Of A Manhattan Call Girl

From Josh Alan Friedman's new book When Sex Was Dirty:

In Sammy's universe, he faced opposition on three fronts: Women Against Pornography; lawsuits from enraged parents of wayward girls who'd come to New York to do porn; and Stephanie Mason, his stiffest competition, who edited a handful of fetish publications.

"Stephanie Mason" is a composite character combining what Josh says are the good parts of Dian Hanson in addition to the nastier qualities he ascribes to an asian writer and hooker now known as Tracy Quan, author Diary Of A Manhattan Call Girl.

Publishers Weekly says: "Fans of Quan's online column may enjoy the continuation of Nancy's X-rated soap opera, but first-time readers may be put off by her snobbishness."

By placing some of Dian in this character, Friedman has earned Dian's eternal enmity.

They competed for girls. They sent jailbait prospects each other's way...

Half Amazon, half intellectual, Mason oversaw five titles a month, each a masturbatory bible for a different fetish [Dian Hanson]. Current mags she edited catered to asshole obsessions, fake jailbait and feet.

"I won't run photos like these," she said, scrupling at a box of color slides on the desk. "I showed them to a proctologist firend of mine. He explained the girl, who's a crack addict, had a prolapsed anus. A very bad trend in the industry."

Ultimately, what Stephanie [Tracy Quan] was gifted at was turning girls out. She would introduce Sammy's wife to playboys and playas, dope kingpins and debonair blades with fancy cars and dubious backgrounds. She was dead set on turning Grubman's ever-suffering, Jewish-converted wife out as a call girl.

Tracy Quan used to date Josh's friend Richard Jaccoma.

In the last six years, she's published extensively in Nerve and Salon.

Tracy Quan is not her real name. Few people know her real name. I hear she has various bogus passports and phony names (including Stephanie Lee).

According to online photos, she appears well preserved. She's in her late 40s.

When Sex Was Dirty

Josh Alan Friedman writes in his new book:

Fred and I got to talking about the national pastime of whacking off to television.

We began compiling Top-10 lists, then a Top 40... My top five were...Tuesday Weld, Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, and Mary Tyler Moore. Fred's were Joan Collins, Joey Heatherton, Sophia Loren, Angie Dickinson and the mother in the Please Don't Eat the Daisies TV series. His all-time favorite scene to "beat off" over was from Inn of the Frightened People [aka Revenge], when a young Joan Collins ravishes a younger boy, accounting for dozens of Fred's finest ejaculations. The flick was repeated often on late-night, where Fred, who scoured each week's TV guide for it, waiting with his Kleenex box, timing his rhythm for 35 minutes into the film, when Collins slinked out.

Our conversations came to an abrupt halt one day. Fred was getting fidgety. "Hey, this stuff is private, our innermost secrets, just between us, right?" he asked. "Ya know," he concluded, "they just don't make TV shows to jerk off to like they used to. Today's cable shows are too easy, too obvious. Anyone can beat off to a porn flick, big deal."

"'Twas an art, jerking off to My Little Margie," I finished.

Blacks and Jews Documentary Director Kevin Page

Kevin plays the character John Wilkins in Friday Night Lights. He's Micajah Autry in The Alamo.

Three years ago, he decided on Josh Alan Friedman as the documentary subject for his first feature-length film.

I call Kevin Monday morning, March 7, 2005.

Luke: "Is it ok if I call you Kevin?"

Kevin: "If you don't, I'll kick your ass. That's how we do it down in Texas."

Luke: "How did you come to select Josh to make your first movie about?"

Kevin: "We were shooting a pilot for a reality TV series on singer-songwriters at an open-mic night in Dallas. Through a series of misadventures, Josh showed up. We were huddled over our cameras trying to film people playing guitar and suddenly the most bombastic single acoustic guitar thing we'd ever seen took place. We looked up and thought, who the hell is that?

"We interviewed him for the background of this television pilot. After the interview was over, I looked up on the wall and there was what appeared to be an original R. Crumb frame. I said, ohmig-d, where did you get the R. Crumb?

"He said, that's not R. Crumb. That's the Friedman brothers.

"It started from there. We got intrigued with Josh's multi-faceted cultish career. We got hooked."

Luke: "How did you come to make your first film?"

Kevin: "I've been a film and television actor for about 25-years. This wasn't our first film. It's the first thing we've put out in the festivals.

"We put together a production company about four years ago. On a whim. It got way out of control. Now we have three producers on staff. We're in the process of four different films. Much of the material we work on now has to do with highly complex scientific issues that we're trying to bring to the general public.

"Josh was a great workout in taking a complex story and trying to articulate that in a way a broad audience could appreciate. We've taken that skill set and extended it into trans-personal psychology, the Dallas gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual prom for highschool kids. We have a series of interviews with psychologists who study spirituality scientifically."

Luke: "What were the principle obstacles you faced in doing this documentary on Josh and how well do you think you overcame them?"

Kevin: "Gosh, there weren't many obstacles other than that we had no idea where we were going when we set out on the path. We had to find our way through the story of the film.

"Having been a writer for many years, I look at documentary filmmaking like writing with video.

"It took a lot longer than you would hope and it always costs a lot more than you would hope. Other than that, we have a film that we are reasonably pleased with and we have a few skills as a result."

Luke: "How come you didn't interview more people about Josh?"

Kevin: "I felt like the story was about the arc of Josh's artistic career. We interviewed several people (including Kinky Friedman) but we ended up deciding the story was the affect of early experiences on the artist's story."

Luke: "Why did you make the final act going back to his childhood?"

Kevin: "We felt like that was the answer to the question of what Josh is. It was a gutsy choice. It's a non-traditional structure for a documentary film. If the thesis was that Josh had been influenced by his childhood, both as the son of a famous figure, and the racial element, to be revealed as the answer to who the hell is this guy."

Luke: Why did you have long excerpts of Josh reading from his experience at the black school?

Kevin: "The idea of the reading toward the end of the film was not only to reveal the background to the question of -- who is Josh? -- in some ways it was a tip of the hat to Spalding Gray. It was a concept I had from earlier projects on how to integrate the words of writers into a viable film.

"It was a bit experimental to have your documentary subject do a 17-minute reading. We'll either be noted for it or slammed.

"The hook of calling it Blacks and Jews and using that thesis came to us after about a year-and-a-half on the project."

Kevin worked on the film for about two-and-a-half years. "That was not intentional. It never is. On the other hand, I think the film the could use it. If we had come out earlier, the film would've been less interesting."

Luke: "What was the context for Josh saying at the beginning, am I some kind of insect that you guys are going to look at under a microscope?"

Kevin: "Josh has a way of starting video sessions with controversial statements. That was just one of them. It was meant, I assume, as a smart-ass aside.

"It was in our second interview and I think it was the first thing he said when the cameras were rolling."

Luke: "How did Josh like it as you started showing him various cuts?"

Kevin: "He liked it. Wouldn't you like it if you were a performer and somebody made a feature-length film about your life? He had some excellent creative feedback. We would not have made the film if we had not had complete cooperation and access to Josh's life.

"We've only had a couple of test screenings. We haven't premiered the film yet."

Luke: "Did you wince before you came out with the subtitle: 'A life obsessed with negroes.'"

Kevin: "We liked it a lot. We had some high-end advertising people help us with our graphics. They had been writing some marketing copy for the one-sheet and that was one of the loglines they came up with. This was before we had landed on the 'Blacks and Jews' concept.

"We thought it was an interesting and attention-grabbing subtitle. Josh says that repeatedly. It's a component of his personality. We thought it got to the heart of the truth of it."

Luke: "I would suspect that 'negroes' is not a word you would use in your daily life."

I don't use it.

Kevin: "Not me. No. As a filmmaker, it is one of the thematic hearts of the film. That's one of Josh's areas of journalistic study. The film is about Josh. It's not about me.

"I don't think there's anything offensive in the film."

Luke: "Did you work on this so long that you grew up hate Josh?"

Kevin: "Yes. But we still get along. It is trying to spend two years watching someone else on video."

Luke: "Why has Josh not been more successful?"

Kevin: "It's the way of the world. To my mind, he has been quite successful as a cult figure."

4/25/05

Josh Alan Friedman Vs. Gil Reavill

Gil writes in his new book:

When I first started working at Screw, one of its editors was Josh Friedman, a PAM (Post-Adolescent Male) so enthusiastic about smut that he seemed to devote much of his life to it. Friedman haunted the pre-Disney Times Square of the 1980s, and wrote a cult-favorite book about its topless shoeshine parlors, live-sex shows, and small-time street hustlers. After Times Square was revitalized in the 1990s, the neighborhood lost its Nelson-Algren-style charm for Josh. He preferred it smutty.

Friedman was a strapping, handsome guy, an extremely talented writer and, from his unlikely perch at Screw magazine, a sardonic commentator on the American cultural landscape.

Josh and his brother, the talented political cartoonist Drew Friedman, collaborated on a series of graphic comics, collected together in books, which poked fun at celebrities... They were precursors of the kind of famicide so much in vogue today.

Josh Friedman was a smoldering presence in the Screw offices, extremely likable, but with an edge of violence that always seemed inexplicable to me. I never could figure out what he was so angry about. I would have paid to have his life. Women adored him. But his anger came out in the texts he wrote for the Friedman Brothers comics, venomous lampoons of the rich and famous. It also came out in his work for Screw.

"I want to do the world's most disgusting coverline," Friedman announced one morning, referring to the large-print lettering on the front cover of the magazine. Coverlines usually announce the contents of the publication, but in Screw's case, they were only tangentially related to what was inside.

"I just walked past a newsstand," Friedman said. "I saw this secretary, you know, panty hose up to here, perfect hairdo."

"Probably from Brooklyn," I said.

"Or Queens," Josh agreed. "I thought of her, you know, coming up to the newsstand to buy her morning Daily News, or maybe some breath mints, and has to reach across a whole stack of Screw magazines."

He laughed at the image. I laughed at the image. We began tossing out coverlines that our Typical Secretary would happen to read, trying to come up with one that would upset her so much she wouldn't be able to think of anything for the rest of the day.

That's how we all thought. We weren't shy about articulating it, either. "Maybe we could come up with one that would make her throw up," Friedman said, laughing.

We began to laugh uproariously as each new suggestion topped the last. Each one was grosser, fouler, more outrageous.

When Screw hit the newsstands the next week, it carried the intentionally disturbing coverline "Special Sex and Diarrhea Issue!" That was the best we could come up with.

We even stood around the corner newsstand for a while the morning the issue came out, hoping that our fantasy would come true, and we would gleefully witness Miss Typical Secretary glance down, read the Screw coverline, and stagger away in horror, her life changed forever.

Nothing happened.

I phone Josh in Dallas.

He said Gil Reavill sent him galleys of his new book.

Josh: "He was very worried that I would be insulted. I wasn't at all. I'm not in total disagreement with his book.

"First of all, it's a hack job. It was a hundred grand hack job. He's completely torn up about it.

"Him saying that he was seduced into the sordid world of pornography couldn't have been further from the truth. I just told [Al] Goldstein about that last week and Goldstein doesn't even want to see it.

"I remember when [Reavill] got in from the Mid-West, brand new to New York, and I think he had nothing but a waiter's job, and Richard Jaccoma hired him off the street into this really nice arrangement we had over there. Within months, he was in charge of all the Oriental health spas. He was getting free massages and getting laid every week, several times a week. Plus, he immediately became Goldstein's ghostwriter for freelance work, extra from Screw. He was writing pieces for Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler. It was a fantastic job. Plus, we had a lot of fun.

"He had a great time. He learned how to write. And now all of a sudden he's saying he was seduced into the sordid world of pornography. A mere hundred grand got him to say that.

"Hang on a second. I'm slaving over a hot oven here cooking for my family. And I'm a lousy cook."

Luke: "Gil says you and your brother were "precursors to the kind of famicide so much in vogue today."

Josh: "What does that mean?"

Luke: "You used to zero in on the foibles of celebrities."

Josh: "Oh. I suppose. Who knows? A lot of what he says in there doesn't particularly ring true."

Luke: "Did you have an edge of violence?"

Josh: "Oh yes. No question."

Luke: "When were you violent?"

Josh: "First, I box seriously. I don't consider that a violent thing at all. I consider it controlled and easy going.

"Back then, I used to get into a fight every week on the streets. Like in the subway. Any time some black guy, you know. If you brushed into a black guy on the subway. At that time, it was so out of hand in New York. It's not like that anymore. You brush into somebody on the subway and they were ready to fight.

"Between that and cabdrivers and stuff and there wouldn't be a week go by where I didn't have some kind of fight or standoff. They seemed to think I would throw them out the window. Manny Neuhaus seemed to think I was going to throw him out the window of the eleventh floor. I may have said that once or twice. I had a little bit of a temper problem.

"But I would never hurt anybody unless I was attacked. It's not like I was a bully."

Luke: "Did you get any criminal sentence for your fighting?"

Josh: "No. I've been taken to court a few times over the years for that, but I rescue insects here in the house and let them out. I won't kill a roach. But if I'm attacked...

"But there was a period when Gil was there and he may have seen me... I just didn't want to take s--- in the streets, especially from what we called 'niggers' back then. There were a lot of frayed nerves on the subways and on the streets between blacks and whites. I couldn't put up with it. Jaccoma was like that too. Jaccoma was a fencer in college. He was very good with knives. If we ever found ourselves in a sticky situation, against a Puerto Rican gang or something, he wouldn't hesitate to whip out a knife. Gil saw a little bit of that and was a little bit intimidated by that."

Luke: "Were you an angry young man?"

Josh: "Yeah, sure. And still am. There's a lot to be angry about. Not for nothing. I wasn't walking around an angry guy. Just the general anger towards the world and injustice."

Luke: "Gil writes, 'Women adored him.' True?"

Josh: "I wish that was true. I told him that. First of all, he was terrified when he emailed me and said he was sending me the galleys and he thought I'd never speak to him again. That I'd hate him.

"I said, 'Gil, no problem. It's flattering. I wish it were more true.' Some people seem to think that women adored me. I was never aware of that."

Luke: "Would you describe your cartoons as 'venomous lampoons of the rich and famous'?"

Josh: "Yeah. I always thought of them as reactions to the sickness of celebrityhood, which is worse than ever now. We celebrated sub-celebrities."

Luke: "Do you recall saying you want to do the world's most disgusting coverline, leading to the 'Sex and Diarrhea' issue?"

Josh: "Nah. Not like that. I just thought it would be funny to do cover lines like that. These are not brilliant coverlines. I thought, let's do a whole issue about s---, and call it the 'Sex and Diarrhea' issue. Not that we were falling down and thinking we were that funny.

"We thought, yeah, let's put that on the cover and every article should be about s---. Just for one issue. Goldstein let us do it [but when he had a BBC interview and that issue was brought out, the host berated him as a sick man and kicked him off the show]. Another one was called 'Voodoo and vomit.'

"There was just something nice about putting that on the cover. They were piled up by the New York Post back then. The more lines we could get like that in big bold type, it seemed like a nice offset to the rest of the newspaper scene."

Luke: "Do you recall trying to shock a secretary?"

Josh: "Not at all. How shocking was it? 'Sex and Diarrhea' is going to shock a secretary? It sounds kinda mild.

"The reason I agree with his book is that I don't think that anybody should have to have pornography thrust in their face. Not in ads or billboards. Even when I worked at Screw, I was offended, even though I personally loved pornography, I was offended on behalf of people who didn't love it and didn't want to see it, like my wife, and have to walk by the subway with 50-men's magazine covers, at that time they were showing tits and ass right on the cover and blazing blowjob headlines. I thought that was horrible."

Luke: "Yet you were trying to write shocking headlines for Screw."

Josh: "That was different because it is a newspaper. It was the only one placed with the other three newspapers. I thought it was cool to have something anti-establishment right in the middle of the establishment. Thanks to the Mafia, we were able to have it there.

"Goldstein had to approve all the headlines. Most of them were stupid."

Luke: "Do you recall waiting around a corner newsstand hoping that a Miss Typical Secretary..."

Josh: "Not at all. I wouldn't have done that. That's Gil's $100,000 advance. Do you think he's going to be on Oprah with his book? Bill O'Reilly? He probably will."

Luke: "He might. He taps into something that a majority of people feel."

Josh: "That's why this editor [Bernadette Malone at Sentinel] over there dreamed this up. It was purely an advance... It was like Madison Avenue executives coming up with a new kind of deoderant at a board meeting. It is stuff utterly without any reason for being needed. Yet they dream it up because they know they're tapping into a market.

"You can't turn the dial anymore. You're going to see tits-and-ass anywhere you look. It doesn't bother me. I still enjoy pornography. Certain kinds. I guess I hardly enjoy it anymore. It goes in one ear and out the other. It doesn't register unless it is really interesting. But I don't think my wife should have to see it if she doesn't want to. For the millions of people who have been sensitized to the Puritan ethic, they shouldn't have to have it rubbed in their faces."

Luke: "Was it his editor who came up with this or Gil?"

Josh: "It was dreamed up at an editorial board meeting. Some editor got a hot idea. Let's get some writer to turncoat in the porn industry, offer them a lot of money, and get them to do a book for the Christian Right. Just what they wanted to hear. It's a cheap marketing idea that will probably pay off.

"They went to Gil. He agonized over it. Then he went for the money. A man's got to earn a living. I'm not offended by his book at all but Richard Jacoma is. Richard did hire him. Gil didn't use Richard's name. He changed it to Manny Neuhaus [the real name of a real editor at Screw who was also at the pornographic weekly while Gil worked there], who nobody likes. I don't hate Manny. I just don't like him. But a lot of people hate him.

"I've been in close touch with Al [Goldstein] recently. I might do Al's book. He wants me to do his biography while he's alive. He's off the streets. I did a feature on him for Razor magazine about the agony of his year on the streets.

"I wanted to do a 35-year history of Screw coffee table book but there are a lot of questions as to who owns the rights to everything. Al lost the name Screw in bankruptcy. Nobody is sure who owns the history of Screw. But he does own his own life story. I'm putting out some feelers to see what kind of deal can be stirred up. Someone is going to do it. Some day there will be a handful of biographies on Al Goldstein.

"I've always had a great time with Al, but he treated me with kid gloves. He never yelled at me.

"[If Josh does the Goldstein book,] I'll bring Jaccoma into it as the third writer."

Luke: "What's the latest on your movie Blacks and Jews?"

Josh: "We're waiting to hear from three festivals. The one that we're hoping for [San Francisco Jewish Film Festival], we haven't got a confirmation yet. It's the biggest Jewish film festival in North America. Once you play that festival, you are automatically swooped into 20 other Jewish film festivals around the world."

Luke: "And your book, When Sex Was Dirty?"

Josh: "Distribution sucks. Feral House is getting a new distributor next year when they put Tales of Times Square back out. It's in about two stores in Dallas. You have to order it online. I'm not seeing any Feral House books around. It's gotten few reviews [aside from Screw, sexwrecks.com, Penthouse]. AVN it's called? They told me months ago that the review would be out in the April issue. It did not come out when Tim Connelly said. He was emailing me about it.

"They're giving a party for Tales of Times Square, the movie, this Thursday and Friday, at Paul Stone's offices, because they shot one 15-minute scene. They're showing it to everybody and celebrating and seeking investors. I thought they had the whole thing financed.

"When they told me they were having a party, I thought, they must be getting ready to wrap. They've been shooting all these months.

"They say they shot one very good scene. They found this homeless black guy who longs for the old days at Times Square. It's from the chapter "Save Our 42nd Street." Skids Grant. It's the only fictional chapter about a down-and-out pimp. I wrote it in the seventies for SoHo News.

"Jaccoma still considers [Reavill] a friend but Jaccoma thinks [the book Smut] is not good for any of us. The tide may be turning. We've got another four years of the Bush administration. There's no telling what could go down. This just fuels the flames of the wrong people and the wrong way of thinking and I tend to dismiss it.

"Jaccoma is usually right about a lot of things. I'm not taking it personal what Gil did. He's flattering to me.

"Bruce Jay's [Josh's father] 75th birthday party is this Saturday at Elaines."

7/10/05

Al Goldstein In Razor Magazine

Josh Alan Friedman writes: "As an appetizer for the book we may write, there's a feature in the July/Aug. Razor magazine. About Al Goldstein's year homeless on the streets of New York."

Thanks to the largesse of remaining friends, many of whose careers he made, Goldstein has survived. After three recent arrests and hitting bottom, Al Goldstein is preparing for his comeback. After all, life itself is nothing but an endless series of comebacks. Back on his diabetic feet, with a gorgeous young fifth wife by his side, Goldstein, 69, currently resides in a small apartment outside Manhattan. I met up with him there, where the interview was momentarily interrupted by a couple of Black dudes who recognized Al on his front porch. Amid high fives, they asked if he could break them into porn. Goldstein himself is breaking back into the porn biz.

Razor: How far did you fall?

Goldstein: For a year and a half I wanted to kill myself. I felt Al Goldstein's gone, washed up. Like one of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow People. Just two months ago I wrote a suicide note. Mostly because my son betrayed me. Jordan did not invite me to his Harvard graduation. He stole a million dollars worth of watches. The idea of a son stealing from his father. . . I've read so much stuff about fathers and sons. Benjamin Franklin did not speak to his son for 20 years because his son supported the English. Alexander the Great killed his father. I loved my kid. I read to him every night, I was the most loving father, I took him to dude ranches, magic camp, gave him $500 a week and a car. Each year I bought him a $10,000 gift, and the last year we were together I gave him a million travel miles from American Express. And then for him to cut me off, and not give me my watches back. He works for Wachtel & Lipton on Madison & 52nd. Anybody who reads this, call him up and tell him to return the watches.

Let me tell you who the friends have been: Steve Hirsch of Vivid sent me $5,000. Paul Fishbein of Adult Video News sent me $5,000. Ronnie Jeremy gave me money...

3/28/06

Josh replies: "Blacks And Jews has played about a dozen one-nighters at theaters in Texas. Next one in spring. It wasn't picked up right away. Kevin Page (the director) and I got caught up with other things, without having time to push it along. I'm finishing the Goldstein book (I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life), which should be out from Thunder's Mouth Press by Oct. this year. And I'm writing the memoirs of Leiber & Stoller, a well as doing an album with them in L.A. Blacks And Jews relegated to the backburner for now, but still expect something to happen."

Director Paul Stone sent out this invite for a New York sneap preview of his new film-in-progress Tales of Times Square:

Tales of Times Square is a film based on the 80s cult classic book of the same name, by Josh Alan Friedman. The book was optioned by Firebrand Films/Concept X Films in 2005 and quickly went into development. The film is a hybrid of both narrative and documentary genres. An homage to the soul of the old New York City, with its tough streets and interesting characters. The film paints a vivid picture of Times Square's seedy past, the sex industries that thrived there, and those that were threatened with extinction by the movement that sanitized the square.

The film is approximately one hour at the moment.

3/29/06

Tales Of Times Square

Author Josh Alan Friedman calls me back Wednesday afternoon.

He's madly trying to finish the Al Goldstein book (I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life), which should be out from Thunder's Mouth Press by October of this year.

Josh has about ten hours of tape with Al. The former Screw publisher was hard to track down. He has an apartment now but he spends his time bothering people, trying to get money and viagra prescriptions and money for his viagra prescriptions.

He was in Los Angeles three weeks ago working on the memoirs of songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and recording an album of their songs. "I want to call it 'Songs for Negroes Only, but Jerry Leiber wants to simplify it and call it, 'Songs for Niggers.'

"They wrote some songs that were too racy for The Coasters to do. We're writing songs together. I got to Canters twice.

"I stopped by Feral House. Publisher Adam Parfrey assures me there will be a new edition of When Sex Was Dirty with all the typos corrected. He wants to take the ten chapters about New York out of Sex and put them in Tales of Times Square and release it to coincide with the movie Tales Of Times Square, if it gets a release. Then he says when can fix all the typos and I can get the right words in.

"Jeff Goodman loves When Sex Was Dirty and loves his portrayal in there even though he says I made him seem like a cartoon. I said, 'Jeff, you are a cartoon.'"

Luke: "What about the guy you wrote about sharing TV masturbation fantasies with?"

Josh: "He won't talk to me anymore. I feel terrible, but I found out that I am not the only one he won't talk to. But he's got a point. I've done a Truman Capote on people. At least I changed their names. What else do they want? I betrayed some secrets.

"I loved Allan MacDonell's book. It got better as it went along. By the end, I wished it was longer.

"Gil Reavill had a movie come out -- Dirty starring Cuba Gooding. It was reviewed in The New York Times. I think it opened and closed in a week. I talk to him once a year."

Plot: "Two gangbangers-turned-cops try and cover up a scandal within the LAPD."

"The worst that Gil said about Al Goldstein in his book I might quote that in Al Goldstein's autobiography. That's one legitimate way to view Al.

"I didn't even call Al's son Jordan. I have a long list of people to interview for the book but we don't need any of it. Al's got a big enough mouth."

Luke: "What did you think of the documentary on Al - Screwed?"

Josh: "Terrible."

Luke: "What did you think of Philip Roth's book on Al Goldstein -- The Anatomy Lesson?"

Josh: "Roth is a genius but almost every one of his books is about 200 pages too long."