Al Goldstein and me

Today's NYT Book Review carries a longish review of "I, Goldstein," the new memoir by the infamous pornographer, Al Goldstein. Reading these lines:

Goldstein, in addition to being a porn king, made an art of self-loathing. It pervades “I, Goldstein” and was his most driving and destructive force. Despite his aggressively funny writing style, Goldstein doubted he was truly intelligent. A self-described “bed-wetting stutterer from Brooklyn” and a punching bag for neighborhood toughs, he feared he would become a milquetoast like his father, a photojournalist who exhibited courage in World War II, working alongside the likes of Ernie Pyle, but addressed elevator operators as “sir.” (He later toiled in Screw’s mailroom.) Goldstein, forever self-conscious about his weight, compensated by making voraciousness the cornerstone of his identity. He describes, touchingly, how as a teenager he was treated by a diet doctor — with whom it turned out his mother was having an affair, because “my father was so inadequate.” Thus he entered manhood primed to defy all who crossed him, and he fulfilled this wish, metaphorically flushing hypocrites and incompetents from President Nixon to his auto mechanic in a ceremonial toilet bowl.

Above all, Goldstein really wanted to be somebody.

...brought to mind my brief personal acquaintance with the man. It was 10 years ago, when "The People vs. Larry Flynt" was in theaters. I was a film critic for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, and Al Goldstein was a local resident (he owned a mansion there). We decided to profile him -- our own local outlaw pornographer. I interviewed him by telephone, and met with Goldstein twice in the course of writing the piece. I visited the Manhattan offices of his (now-defunct) magazine Screw, and later met him and his then-wife for dinner at Elaine's, and on a second occasion he invited me and a friend to one of his regular Sunday brunches (he'd rent out the room of a restaurant, and fill the place with his buddies). I had to look at copies of Screw for research, and it was probably the most repulsive, degrading thing I've ever seen. It was utterly despicable, and without the least redeeming merit. Yet I was genuinely startled by how much I pitied Goldstein -- I mean, really pitied him, not in a sneering, condescending way. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was such a black hole of raw emotional need. Nor have I ever met anyone who so plainly despised himself -- or in whom self-loathing manifested itself so strangely. When he talked about his son, Jordan (that he would give his son that kind of name tells us a lot), doing well at Georgetown, he got tears in his eyes. He was, as I recall, estranged from his son at the time, and if memory serves, felt acutely that his boy was ashamed of his old man. And Goldstein thought the boy should be ashamed of him ... and yet he loved that kid ferociously. What a sad, complicated man. And incapable of learning a thing: this 2004 Page Six item finds the elderly Goldstein, despised by his son (who since graduated from Harvard Law), living in a homeless shelter, receiving charity from bums. Still, he tells Page Six: "People ask me would I trade it, if I knew 35 years ago what would happen to me? I wouldn't. It's been a fair trade. I had the best women, the best wine and the best cigars."

There was no question, of course, that he was (and perhaps still is) a malicious pig. But to be around him is to see that the true object of his malice is himself. His entire life's work is an elaborate pageant of self-torment. I went into this assignment with extreme distaste, expecting to confront a two-bit monster, but found ... well, yes, that, but something else too. Al Goldstein's story is not yet done. Who knows what is in his future? Peace, I hope; underneath all that fat and filth and spite is a human being. A human being deformed by evil and the absence of love, but a human being created for something else (hmm, perhaps not unlike...). I mean, I'm not one of those sentimental people who looks at bad men and imagines a pitiable, cringing creature underneath it all. But in Goldstein's case, I have to admit it was pretty hard for me to conclude otherwise.

Two other things came to mind: 1) Goldstein told me he got started on his path when his uncle took him as a teenager to a prostitute, to initiate him into manhood; 2) when my pal Lebowitz and I went to Goldstein's brunch, we met the proprietor of the Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada, who offered to comp us as Friends of Al if we ever made it out West. When we told our girlfriends about this, they were not amused.