Men Read Free Page B

self-appointed expert on all things Hustler , seated across from the founding father himself in his thickly carpeted penthouse emporium atop the huge kidney-shaped office tower on Wilshire Boulevard, the one with his name emblazoned on the roof in towering letters that you can see for miles. If the magazine is a battleground of sex and vulgarity, Flynt’s office was no less an assault on the senses: Tiffany lamps dueling with garish rococo furniture, gold and velvet-covered clashing everything—it looked like armies of rival interior decorators had fought and died on the job. The surprisingly charming Flynt presided over this expensive-looking mishmash from his famous gold-plated wheelchair (a long-ago assassination attempt by a professed white supremacist enraged by Hustler ’s interracial pictorials had left him paralyzed from the waist down 2 ). All those years in the chair have given him an extreme case of middle-aged spread: his face has a melted quality, with only a hint of the self-confident cockiness from old pictures. Newly image-conscious with Forman’s biopic about to be released, he told me immediately that he was on a diet. “I may be a cripple, but I don’t have to be a fat cripple,” he chortled hoarsely.
    This helped break the ice, though I was still in a state of mental confusion, faced with this large, damaged, flesh-and-blood man in place of my theoretical construct. On the one hand, I felt like I knew him intimately, having spent so much time conjuring him in my imagination and then crafting him on the page, but at another level everything was also unbridgeable between us. He, of course, had spent no time imagining me, I assumed, though he did pronounce my essay on him “feisty.” This pleased me a little too much—I wanted his good opinion, yet I also wanted not to care about what he thought of me. I also wasn’t sure if by “feisty” he meant the various potshots I’d taken at him in print or just that I’d bucked received feminist wisdom about the magazine, which had not exactly been popular in those precincts.
    He wanted to correct me on one point, he said. I’d repeated what I’d read elsewhere—that the shooting and surgeries had left him with no bowel or urinary control, an ironic fate for a man who’d built an empire offending bourgeois sensibilities with their horror of errant bodily functions. To compound the ironies, this man who’d raked in millions on the fantasy of endlessly available fucking was also left impotent—or so I’d written. Flynt said it was the only thing I’d gotten wrong: he’d never been impotent. This seemed like rather intimate territory given the brevity of our acquaintance. I said I’d take his word for it.
    Having cleared that up, we talked more easily about my essay and his magazine, then he invited the ghostwriter (also in attendance) and me to tag along to a private movie screening up in the Hollywood Hills. Which we did, and afterward trailed Larry and his small entourage to a late-night deli in Beverly Hills. He was gracious and congenial, but I never lost the double consciousness of feeling I was accompanying a character sprung from the recesses of my own fantasies.
    This feeling was compounded when the ghostwriter sent me an advance copy of the autobiography a short time later. I was taken aback yet, I have to admit, gratified to find that passages I’d written about Hustler had been inserted into Larry’s mouth as his first-person account of himself. Another passage, followed by my name, had been excerpted and reproduced on the back cover in the form of a blurb, just below the ones by Oliver Stone and Milos Forman.
    I mention this to explain why my attitude toward Flynt may have a certain proprietary quality: it’s because I invented him. Or let’s say I invented a version of him that I found palatable, and he went along with it. If only other men