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Music Review
Sharps & Flats
On Rhino's exhaustive "1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions," the Stooges obliterate the line between dumb joke and visionary achievement.
By Don McLeese
[03/13/00]

Television
The wacky world of television
On American game shows, you answer questions and win money. In the rest of the world, you get naked and bob for false teeth in a bucket of pig eyeballs.
By Gavin McNett
[03/13/00]

Movie Review
"The Ninth Gate"
Johnny Depp stars in Roman Polanski's newest, an amusing and deadpan literary thriller.
By Charles Taylor
[03/10/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
The sad, dangerous sounds of the Dirty Three capture the wisdom of pain and experience.
By Lydia Vanderloo
[03/10/00]

Movie Review
"Mission to Mars"
In space, no one can hear you jeer.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[03/10/00]

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My sprawling Irish Catholic family returned a collective look of bewilderment. "What the hell is 'Survivor'?"

They hadn't even heard. CBS was planning to strand 16 people on a desert island off the coast of Borneo. Six weeks working together to catch their own food, build their our own huts -- and voting every three days to boot one of the team off the island. The last one standing wins $1 million.

I'd made it to the semifinals, one of 50 from the Denver region. The producers were coming out mid-January to interview us down to three. Those finalists would be flown out to L.A. with 45 more from 15 other cities for intense interviews and a battery of physical and mental evaluations.

I was still an 800-1 long-shot for the million dollars, but I wasn't thinking about the money. I was just dying for the adventure. Just a chance to take on the pythons, deadly sea snakes and wild pigs -- not to mention 15 desperate, greedy, back-stabbing teammates.

"Eight-hundred-to-1, my ass," my brother sneered. "Way I figure it, your odds are a million to one. Not a chance in hell those people are going to pick you. Not a chance in hell."

My brother just didn't grasp how badly I wanted this. Bad enough to let the whole wide world in on my dirty little secret: I'd worked my way through grad school as a gay porn star.

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I really did grow up dreaming of running away to the circus, only vaguely aware I'd been born into the wrong century. Eventually, I was sure, I'd be an astronaut. I just needed some sort of adventure to tide me over until adulthood. The Eagle landed just after my eighth birthday, and I spent the night plotting my own private space race: making it to my 20s before NASA could make it to Mars. Moonwalking was taken, but perhaps I could be first onto a planet.

I did run away finally, from college, halfway through my senior year. NASA had no plans for a Mars mission; I realized that the Apollo program was a one-shot fling. All the great adventures had already sailed. So I enlisted in an ancient one: the infantry. I signed up for a stint in South Korea. Never made it there. The Army kept me on at Fort Benning, Ga., as a drill corporal after basic training: a year training troops, then on to Officer Candidate School, where they turned me into a lieutenant.

The infantry was heaven -- digging foxholes, sleeping out in the rain and attacking defensive perimeters in the Georgia back country -- but my peer group was getting away from me. After I left the Army, I had to fight hard to catch them, and began a 10-year stint in the corporate grind. But I got the strangest satisfaction out of playing against type. I spent five years at Ross Perot's company as a systems analyst, another five management consulting for Arthur Andersen. I finally got to Asia after the Gulf War: two years consulting in Kuwait through the reconstruction period, with plenty of time off to trek through Thailand, Morocco, India and Vietnam.

Suddenly, I chucked my corporate career, headed to grad school to start a new life as anthropologist or author. But there was still this other fantasy, dating back to high school. It never achieved the status of dream, because it seemed so implausible, a one-in-a-million shot compared to space travel. In high school I was an awkward, gangly dork. But I had a wild imagination, and what I really wanted to do was be a Chippendales dancer.

Twenty years later, at 34, when porn stars are supposed to be washed up or dead, I stumbled onto the ad. "Jackoff Contest Thursday," the headline read. Jackoff contest? What the hell was that? Was it even legal? Turned out that it was about style, not speed. You jerked off for half an hour and audience applause determined the winner. I blush to say that I won first prize. It wasn't quite my Chippendales fantasy, but I was just thrilled someone wanted to see me naked. And eventually I progressed from fat, old, balding men in towels to fat, old, balding men in bars -- and occasionally even a bachelorette party. I hadn't intended to make a career out of it, but the promoter doubled as an agent, and a year later I was posing for magazine pictorials and pumping out pornos in front of a video camera in L.A.

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