Legs McNeil and the Pornstar

Her cheeks were sucked in and high boned. She said something mysterious about “what he gave me when I did him in the bathroom of CBGBs in 1970.” Was it a disease or drugs, we wondered.

The reading had the intimacy of an orgy, at least 30 people who knew each other for 30 years showed up; you needed as much for an oral history.

Legs was a professional. He wore his 58 years in dog-year multiples. Most recently his much younger lover died of an amputation gone bad; these were the gory tales that seemed to encircle his friends and they made sure you knew; they liked exposure.

Awkward and doddering in daylight, they were about the brush with the law, about superstition and paranoid intelligence. Somehow the subversiveness had to be linked to the highest levels of the government, but if it was as simple as liking sex or your body or plain abandon, you were welcome too.

This was a story told by people with just parts of the puzzle but Legs was the Kaiser Souzai, the figure behind the curtain controlling it all, but in the moment, disarming with his chain diet cokes and jitteriness.

I can’t say I knew much of the sexual awakening of the 70s. I remember posh houses with Playboy magazines displayed in the bathrooms. As the writer for the New Yorker wrote, it was less important to have seen Deep Throat than to be able to say you saw it.

And these were the people who lived it. It wasn’t all tragedy and pathology and like any other group bound externally by an informal label, that eventually became an industry, they were single individuals pursuing personal needs who came to be collectively defined and edified through story.

They were part of a private trafficking, the other network, a hidden web of knowing, that only in daylight is cheap. We were there to hear them, if for no other reason than they were witnesses to the most human, the most intimate of changes in our recent history.

I imagined the pornstar even older, grandmotherly – the grandmother who fucked guys at CBGBs and the skinny old men who were denied by her, still rubbing it in. There is a certain glory in looking back at a hard time, in recasting pain as passion and need and fear as guts.