Woodstock, Porno, and Me

The bizarre, hilarious, and haunting true story of an NYU film student/cabbie turned-cameraman in the East Village’s porno underworld.

Note: This is a rewrite of something I shared back in the early days of this blog. I’m reposting it as a reminder to myself of just how spectacularly weird my life has been. I left normal behind so long ago, I’m not even sure I’d recognize it if it showed up wearing a name tag.

In the dog days of 1969, just as a half-million blissed-out flowerheads were pitching tents in the mud fields of Woodstock, I rolled into New York’s East Village—a boiling cauldron of hash smoke, sex films, and sidewalk prophets. The air smelled like hot garbage, street incense, and dreams gone sideways. It was the underground’s golden hour, and I was a NYU film student on summer break, spending my days devouring Bergman films and my nights behind the wheel of a yellow cab, marinating in the madness of a city perpetually on the edge of implosion.

My temples throbbed with Miles, Hendrix, and the half-mad notion that somewhere between The Fillmore East and a scratched-up Super 8 reel, I might stumble onto some kind of meaning. One night, I got robbed in the cab—first of three times—and limped back to my freshly acquired East Village crash pad, only to find some wiry guy lounging on the stoop like he owned the place. That’s when I met Alex Mann—a porn hustler, hash slinger, and certified East Village myth—who opened our friendship with a revelation:

“I’m Alex Mann, and I have the most famous cock on Eighth Avenue.”

You don’t forget a line like that.

Alex was a sex-film hustler with a side gig in Afghan hash distribution and a petting zoo’s worth of cats living in a candlelit dungeon apartment draped in black-out curtains, leather, and medieval enthusiasm. His wife Pam was a platinum-blonde dominatrix who looked like she wandered out of a Russ Meyer casting call and into a Sid & Marty Krofft fever dream.

🎥 Cut to Scene One: The Camera Job from Hell

I’m in his apartment, halfway through a slab of black Afgani government-stamped hashish that could melt vinyl. Alex leans in with the pitch:

“You wanna shoot a film?”

But of course. I was 21. I had delusions of Fellini and dreams of Orson Welles. I thought it was going to be art. Instead, it was five couples getting undressed under construction-paper backdrops in an abandoned commercial space on West 48th Street. The equipment? A single Super 8mm camera with no lights, no sound, no soul.

Then Alex the Director kicked in.

“Just show some skin,” Alex shrugged.

“They don’t care if it’s out of focus, they just want to see some tits.”

There I was—dancing between naked bodies with a whirring camera, documenting America’s pre-hardcore libido like a stoned anthropologist in a porno anthropology museum. I didn’t know if I should laugh, cry, or shower with bleach.

I filmed a half-dozen scenes. Got paid. Bought a grilled cheese and a chocolate shake. And took a two hour shower to wash off my sins. Welcome to the adult film industry.

📼 Scene Two: The Appointment

Pam, Alex’s wife, played a leather-clad lesbian dom trying to convert a mopey, half-nude ingenue named Arlana in a film called The Appointment. Alex wrote the script, directed it, lit it with whatever candles weren’t already melted onto the floor.

I operated the camera and tried to forget the fact that the cats were watching. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t fun. It was Brechtian torture theater with boobs.

But hey, it was cinema. Sort of. I thought about telling my Film School Prof Marty Scorsese about it, but somehow never got around to it.

🚨 Scene Three: The Bust

Fast forward. I’m out of the business, after one or two other shoots. Living off Tenth Avenue in a $79-a-month railroad flat. Film School during the day, the streets of New York at night, driving a cab. The phone rings at 3AM. It’s Alex. He’s been raided. Cops broke the window. Cats are spooked. Hash is scattered. He needs me to cat-sit and bail him out at night court. Of course he does.

I hop into a cab and go down to his apartment on Eleventh Street between B and C. My old building, now gone. This was long before the East Village was gentrified. Quite a scene in the apartment. Alex, Pam, lots of cats, and the cops. And whips, chains, strap-ons and vats of lubricant.

Alex hands me a wad of bills, to bail him out. They all leave, except for one cop, Ernie. He goes through the content in Alex’s roll top desk and talks about how they’re only looking for the big guy. Alex told the cops that he’s scheduled to call soon. Ernie tells me I’d be doing Alex a big favor it I’d call the police immediately after Mr. Big calls. Mr. Big never called.

Meanwhile, he finds a treasure trove of Polaroids of Pam in a various states of nudity. “What a crazy broad,” he remarks, as he puts the photos in his pocket.

At five am, I found a leftover chunk of hash in the desk. Just what the doctor ordered. I fired up Alex’s hookah and watched The Wrong Man on TV, Hitchcock’s ode to the innocent accused. Life imitates noir.

By dawn, I’m at 100 Centre Street handing over $600 in cash to spring the man who once said, “This isn’t porn, it’s performance.”

🧳 Scene Four: The Disappearance

Alex moved to L.A. shortly after getting popped for running a live sex show in a Times Square loft above a Hasidic jewelry shop. He was trying to open The Love Nest. It didn’t pan out. Nothing in that world did for long.

I called him a few times from New York. No answer. Then one day, decades later, I found his IMDb page.

“Alex Mann, 1941–2010… appeared in I Drink Your Blood, Sometime Sweet Susan, and Malibu High. Ran brothels. Lived loud. Died of tongue cancer in Sherman Oaks.”

🎬 Fade Out

Alex Mann. Pimp, poet, pornographer, prophet. A man with fifteen cats, a dream, and a dick that could get him arrested.

What I saw wasn’t just smut. It was the underbelly of a generation slouching toward liberation, flailing for identity in the dark, sweaty catacombs of pleasure and power.

I wasn’t there to moralize. I was there to document.

And I did.

One sticky Super 8 frame at a time.

—-

Until we meet again, let your conscience be your guide.