Traci Lords, Sexy Nude Teen Porn Sex, and McZero

Since last you and I commiserated, two key events have transpired:

1. The October 25th anniversary of Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith departing from this world for which she was simply too groovy. Mr Skin mourned with great respect, but a deeper T&Analysis is eminently warranted.

2. Devilishly handsome Mark Johnston of Shocking Videos sent me a copy of the UK documentary X-Rated Ambition: The Traci Lords Story. Seeing as I owe Mark loads of gratitude for the indirect loads of loads with which he’s supplied me over the years, we’ll dedicate this week’s column to the Queen of Mastur-Jailbait.

Like this:

Understand one thing. Please. My very first sighting of my very first Playboy (which was stashed, not well, in the McBeardo family bathroom hamper), hit me like a ton of pricks and instantly hooked me on photographic representations of the naked female form in gloriously gaudy commercial context.

I was a seven-year-old porn junkie. True story.

The specific Playboy that addicted me, hopelessly and immediately, was the November 1975 edition, which boasted red-headed, robustly-racked Janet Lupo as its centerfold, in a spread titled “Hooray for Hoboken.”

From that instant onward, I needed more, forever, and I got it wherever I could: illustrated Fredericks of Hollywood ads, naked lady golf tees in the Spencer Gifts catalogue, a directory of “unexpurgated” book covers in the back of my father’s edition of Ulysses by James Joyce that was doubtlessly purchased from a Times Square kiosk of questionable repute.

But especially potent were the eye-popping ads for porno movies splattered all over the New York tabloids right there with all the latest offerings from Hollywood and Disney and numerous trash-film studios (the most indelible off-shoot to me ever being Snuff’s tagline: “The movie that could only be made in South America – where life is CHEAP!”).

Over the course of the third and fourth grade, I became knowledgeable as to the likes of the with the most active stars and the top porn directors of the day (including Joe Gage, whose all-male ads always conveyed a weird, haunted feeling in synch with stark titles such as L.A. Tool & Die and Joe Gage’s Garage).

By the time I turned 10, I could match faces to the names, and I memorized a great deal of which naked lady appeared in what naked lady movie, and who made it, and when.

Now, my childhood wasn’t all mentally tracking the career trajectories of Gerard Damiano and Lisa De Leeuw. I was also plenty obsessed with horror flicks, Mad magazine, early Saturday Night Live, the ’77-’78 New York Yankees, and kiddie bullshit like Star Wars and punk rock, too. Plus there was the onset of suicidal depression in kindergarten to keep me preoccupied.

Still, porn was the drug I absolutely ached to score, so much so that I’d endure an entire Saturday of shopping at Kings Plaza with Mammy McB just to saunter past a newsstand on the way home, where the unimaginably raunchy slap-mag covers of yore overwhelmed me. That was where I could really – through stolen, hyper-concentrated glances -- put together just exactly who these X-rated titans were.

I viewed them all as divine beings. Nothing less. When I started finding copies of Adam Film World, Cinema Blue, and Erotic X-Film Guide in backed-up sewer grates and behind dumpsters and all other such places a healthy youngster might forage for entertainment, I understood the lucky fellow who’s letter got printed wherein he detailed “worshiping my goddess Seka.”

I had my favorites early on, and they lasted throughout my early teens, as the medium expanded from magazines to home video, all the while continuing to entice and bedazzle with torrid titles all aglitter on beaming theater marquees.

There was the aforementioned freckled and flame-maned Lisa DeLeeuw, flat-chested teenager Sharon Mitchell, jugsy Joey Karson (who specialized in crazy S&M titles that played at the Avon theaters), Taboo mom Kay Parker, and golden (in the best sense) girl Annie Sprinkle, who I even found out hailed from my native Brooklyn!

A 1984 copy of Adult Cinema Review, however, presented me with a fresh face, and a pair of enormous, up-turned tits tipped with nipples that are best described as corpulent pink light-bulbs, and she blew away all previous comers and, really, all comers who were yet to come.

Indeed, “come” was the word (have you heard?) when I laid eyes on Traci Lords as a nude mermaid who magically sprouts a human vagina in the magazine’s review of Talk Dirty to Me Part III (1984).

The movie was a Splash knock-off and a sequel-in-inexplicable-name-only, as the previous two Talk Dirty to Me flicks were gritty, semi-realistic sagas of John Leslie as a ladies’ man with intimacy issues (there was also another spin-off titled Nothing to Hide). It took a half-a-fish for him to conquer his inner torments.

Of course, as Talk Dirty III’s mythical creature in question was embodied by Traci Lords, so I could believe that this would be the cure for any and all conceivable ailments.

Soon thereafter the “Oh, God She’s Nude” issue of Penthouse featuring Vanessa Williams going black-and-white lesbo in black-and-white photos went to press and, again, I cannot imagine how my penis possibly survived. Because not only did the mag contain Miss America eating muff, its centerfold was none other Traci Lords!

And so our one-sided, greasy-fisted love affair grew ever deeper.

Come my junior year (pun intended ... again … always), I grew sufficiently obese and broken-down to pass as a tubercular middle-aged truck dispatcher (albeit one with chronic cystic acne), thereby enabling myself to rent porn tapes without so much as a half-cocked video-store clerk’s eyebrow regarding my age. I was simply the lump who rented all the Traci Lords movies, all the time.

And what movies I rented! Among the very breast:

Sister Dearest (1984)
A fraternity farce on par with the era’s most uproarious teen (in this case, literally) sex comedies. Tom Byron (Traci’s real-life beau off-camera) plays a nerd a named Randy pledging Gamma Nu. One condition of passing is that Randy must ditch his virginity. Traci, as his sister, sees to it that he makes the grade. Incest in ’80s porn (before the Meese Commission, at least) was more common than breast implants today. Ah, were those ever the times!

Those Young Girls (1984)
Traci takes on the only real contender for her Miss Mid-’80s Porn Queen Supreme, Ginger Lynn, in an odd four-person character piece which also involves Harry Reems and John Holmes. The McMoney shot occurred -- repeatedly, I assure -- when pert-nerpled Ginger oils up Traci’s gigantic, gravity-mocking gazongas while they’re nude sunbathing. Screenplay by Ginger Lynn herself!

Harlequin Affair (1985)
The big one with the big four -- specifically, Traci and Christy Canyon. Here they play sisters who, to prep for meeting their brother’s new African-American wife, engage in the most lap-liquefying rough-sex lesbian bedroom grapple ever videotaped. At one point, Traci mounts mountain-mammaried Christy Canyon nude like a pony, using a long, floppy dildo as a riding crop.

New Wave Hookers (1985)
As a whacked-out, surrealistic, hardcore mind-ripper, The Dark Brothers’ New Wave Hookers ranks second only to Café Flesh (1982). And that is high, heady praise to be sure. However more effective Café Flesh may be as a freaky midnight-movie, however, only New Wave Hookers boasts Traci in devil horns and nothing else, thrusting her all in a fuck scene that, had legal complications not befouled everyone’s good time, would have endured for all eternity.

A decade later, I collaborated with New Wave Hookers director Gregory Dark, writing a handful of screenplays for him (do not miss Animal Instincts III: The Seductress). He gave me an original New Wave Hookers poster, which showcases Traci with her trademark horns and her even-more-trademark milk-balloons straining against a mesh top. You have to see it to believe it. Way, way up close.

Only recently did I have the New Wave Hookers poster properly framed. I still haven’t hung it up. For me to look at teenage Traci is to be taken back to the one-way mirror world of porn consumption in my parents’ basement throughout high-school. How big a rush would you be to go back there?

Welcome to my subterranean lair on East 28th Street, where I’d sit there, transfixed, not believing such a creature as Traci Lords could exist but, then marveling. There she was. The blonde mane. The fuck-kitten facial features. The red inner-tube lips. The heart-shaped ass atop toned legs. The flat tummy with just the tiniest palmable softness around the navel (I believe the uncomfrotable term is "baby fat"). And those breasts, those mammoth, ski-slope-shaped wonders that peaked upward into nipples unlike anything I’ve seen before or since. And I’ve seen some nipples in my day, mind you.

Plus there was Traci’s energy, and the supernova star power she radiated, straight through the TV screen. In keeping with the W.A.S.P.-ian tenor of the times, she very much did fuck like a beast. And she’d pout. And sneer. And toss her hips when she walked. And she smoked ferociously, poking her cigarette at people as though it were a weapon. What a bitch. I loved her.

Traci Lords’ allure completely enraptured me. It was uniquely hers, but it was also … familiar. Of course it was. Traci Lords was a teenager. She was 15, 16, and 17 at the exact same moments that I was.

We were a lot alike, I think, now -- A couple of adolescent sex wrecks working through our volumes of developmental trauma using the tools at our underage disposal. For Traci, that meant her body. For me, that meant watching Traci’s body and writing about. Oh, how times have not changed.

Most of the Traci Lords movies I rented came from Ronny’s Video on Avenue J. If there could have possibly been a more rabid devotee of Traci in the Flatbush/Midwood area than I, it would’ve been Ronny.

Adorning the walls of the store’s behind-the-curtain section (the kind men like) was a letter from Ronny that had been printed in Philadelphia’s fledgling Adult Video News (familiar to Howard Stern Show fans from The Porn Report with Paul Fishbein) in which he praised Traci Lords as “the unattainable goddess” and, high above the racks of box covers, loomed a gigantic blow-up featuring Ronny at some porn convention with his arm around the unattainable goddess herself.

Proof that some Attainable God might exist, then, occurred on a May morning in 1986 when I wandered into Ronny’s video just as he cracked open the Daily News to read that Traci Lords had been busted. She had just turned 18, and made all those movies, except one (Traci, I Love You, which she still owns), when she was underage. Ronny was, suffice to say, flabber-fuckin’-gasted. I was … aroused.

My senior prom was coming up. Traci Lords and I were the same age. I imagined her accompanying me to the Plaza Hotel in front of my Xavier High School Class of ’86 brethren. In fact, I imagined it to the tune of Bob Seger’s “You’ll Accomp’ny Me”. I thought maybe Traci Lords and I could even be friends. Maybe … more.

The eruption of foul language and obscene Sicilian hand gestures coming from Ronny jolted me back to reality. Traci Lords being the same age as me was just one more thing to get obsessed about. And not stop. Still.

Traci’s Big Trick (1987) was the X-rated industry’s response to the whole to-do after all existing Traci Lords materials had to be pulled from the marketplace and the smut had settled.

It’s a pretty limp attempt to detail Traci’s rise to porn stardom from the jizz-biz point of view, loaded with not-funny-enough inside-baseball gags (the Greg Dark character is named “Mr. Black,” haw-haw). As the lead, French dish Jacqueline Lorians, while lovely, can not come close to conveying Traci’s status as, you know, what Ronny wrote in his letter to AVN.

The standout moment in Traci’s Big Trick actually, happens when Jerry Butler and Ron Jeremy (both Brooklyn natives!) are ogling lesbo action in the back of a limosine, and Jerry, in a moment of heated sincerity, turns to Ron and says: “I want you to jerk me off!”

That's truly noteworthy, however, is that Traci’s Big Trick was co-written by Lisa Loring, the all-grown-up (and out) little Wednesday from The Addams Family TV show, and the lucky, lucky bride of Mr. Jerry Butler.

In 1988, Traci went R-rated in Roger Corman’s Not of This Earth remake, and she even bares her boobs. But she had grown into them by then. They fit the rest of her body and the nipples looked merely … human.

I was happy when Traci appeared opposite Joe Flaherty on Married … With Children, and hooked up with John Waters for Cry-Baby. I also like that she became a B-movie almost-icon in numerous enjoyable straight-to-video dumbnesses like Fast Food (1989), Laser Moon (1992), and Skinner (1993). She even comes pretty close to acceptable nakedness in the erotic thriller Extramarital.

Traci Lords’ 2003 autobiography, Underneath It All, is an unmoving tale of woe meant to cash in on Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.

Neither one can hold an enorged appendage to Lights! Camera! Sex! By Christy Canyon and/or Raw Talent by Jerry Butler. Higher literary recommendations, when it comes to those two tomes, I can not make.

Most recently, Traci Lords portrayed a woman who keeps her shirt on and, off-camera, can blow soap bubbles with her vagina, and is thus nicknamed Bubbles, in some Kevin Smith shit with a guy I am really in no position to write anything unpleasant about.

My one other personal Traci tit-bit worth mentioning is that my publishing idol, the New-Jersey-based creator of a Xeroxed horror movie review sheet that inspired me to attempt professional writing in the first place, torpedoed his own bootleg video business by peddling Traci Lords tapes along with out-of-print Jess Franco gore-fests and Lemora the Lady Dracula recorded right off of channel 9.

All this leads to Shocking Videos sending me a copy of X-Rated Ambition: The Traci Lords Story.

Two aspects of this 45-minute documentary render it unique:

1. It is told through the eyes of the porn industry, which paints Traci Lords as an unsympathetic schemer who masterminded her rise using flawless fake identity documents and a zeal for power and success unseen in smut before she set everything ablaze.

2. Lots and lots of uncensored, vintage teenage Traci Lords nudity. Now, we don’t get to see any full penetration action, of course, but to be able to revisit those wondrous whoppers in their volley-ball-nippled pubescent glory is a teat treat of the hottest, hardest order.

As always, the Teabags cover American pop-trash better than we ever seem to do ourselves (just check out their Maxim magazine versus ours), especially when it comes to naked girls (emphasis on the second word there).

The usual talking porno heads bloviate (“Oh, great -- Bill Margold and Nina Hartley would like to share their experience, strength, and bloat! Whooop-DEE!”), but so, too, do Suze Randall, Peter North, Tom Byron, and oily-mustache extraordinaire, Jim South.

All told, X-Rated Ambition: The Traci Lords Story is just one of thousands of very real, very rare, very mind-freakin’-blowing reasons to patronize Shocking Videos.

Whatever your own personal Traci Lords sexy nude teen porn sex baggage.