I drove from Grand Rapids to a Cryonics Institute in the suburbs of Detroit. There was no way into the Institute, but there was a car with a bumper sticker advertising the facility with the words “Never say die.” It’s somewhat enough to just stand outside of a building with a bunch of frozen people, but for the most part, it’s pretty boring to be hanging out in any industrial park, sans serial killers.
I was set to meet Mike, a sales guy headed to Exxxotica New Jersey to market Penthouse energy shots. Which is like a five-hour energy that uses sex to sell. Mike lives in St. Claire Shores, a town I arrive in about 45 minutes early. I kill the time by nursing a shot (bartender’s choice) in a pub called The Ugly Duckling. It’s filled with people twice my age listening to blaring metal. Two guys want to tell me about the Red Wings. I’m from Michigan. I’ve heard of that before, but don’t give a fuck.
I leave this place and meet up with Mike and Andy Pellegrini, who you may remember from The Gathering of the Juggalos as the Insane Clown Posse’s lawyer and publicist. Andy is Mike’s twin brother’s girlfriend.
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It’s a 10-hour drive from Metro Detroit to Edison, New Jersey, one Mike has decided he is going to make straight on through in his Ford Focus. I settle in the backseat… and we drive. It’s boring.
Our hotel in New Jersey a place called the Edison Hotel, which is NOT the hotel I kept saying we should book and therefore NOT the hotel all the porn stars are staying in. However, it’s decent. Six hours of sleep is something of enough.
I haven’t spent much time in Jersey. I drove through it once before, last October, to get to New York. I stopped in a wooded area called Shades of Death Road after reading about the origins of the name, origins that include Indian burial grounds, killer cats, bandits and disappearing children. Who wouldn’t? This time in Jersey, I’m in civilization. It seems just like anywhere else, except that every single thing I receive isn’t what I ordered.
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At the New Jersey Convention and Expo Center, a bunch of men with tattoos and leather jackets are milling about, carrying in boxes. Girls in yoga pants and pounds of makeup wheel in suitcases, presumably full of burlesque costumes and heels and more makeup. I wait for photographer Nik Walzak to arrive from Pennsylvania before registering as media.
Inside the convention center, I was expecting a lot of sexually suggestive promo material and toys, as well as a host of awkwardly pretty girls in lingerie dancing on portable poles. This is exactly what is inside the convention center. However, I’m also pleased to see there’s a good amount of hardcore pornography playing and a good amount of fetishism. The girls do dance in poles and makeshift cages, but also ride a mechanical bull where the bull is actually a giant cock (one girl wears it sans panties, then finishes her ride by sucking on a large plastic dildo) and take turns licking each other’s crotches through their panties.
Porn stars in attendance are as dulcet as aspartame, for the most part, signing naked posters of themselves and charging five dollars to take a photo hugging any paying pervert. Here’s where it sort of gets awkward.
I’ve met a fair amount of “famous” people. Musicians, mostly. Meeting them makes me a little nervous because as a journalist, I never want to come across as pushy, looking for an interview. Famous people usually don’t impress me so much, and I find most of them to be just like ordinary people. When I do interview them, I know what to ask. It makes sense. You ask them about their new albums, their upcoming tour, you see where those questions go and expand on them. But when Dana DeArmond, who is staggeringly pretty, points to a box cover of her ass and says, “That’s me!,” I can’t just say, “Yeah, I saw your show in Detroit.” It’s more like, “Yeah, I’ve seen you get two penises in your ass… I mean, for research. I mean, because I was going to this… ……..because I was masturbating?”
I fumble through a conversation with Dana. She says she doesn’t really like to talk about sex very much, but she’d rather people give her “cleaning tips, recipes… housewife-y stuff.” I might have to try to think of a good recipe for her. She tells me there’s a party at the Sheraton later, in the bar. Dana’s too cute to not make me nervous, so I thank her for the tip and say I hope to see her later.
Meandering around the rest of the convention, I peruse the wares. Chocolate popsicles shaped like cocks and vaginas, vibrating cock rings, glass dildos, various lubricants, ball gags, manacles, lingerie, stripperware, DVDs, magazines, autographed posters, strap-ons, bondage gear, one-hitters. There’s a car and motorcycle show, containing only the douche-iest of cars. You know, like a Trans Am with Wolverine airbrushed on the hood, or Jeeps with stripper poles mounted on them.
There’s a man walking around in nothing but a bondage harness, shoes and a leather thong, taking videos. There’s also a man wearing a slip and heels, with “little monster” tattooed on his back. The later it gets, the more weirdos show up. The kind of guys that look like serial killers and get overly excited to meet and greet their favorite masturbatory subjects. These are the guys I like watching the most. Because for them, porn isn’t funny. It’s what they do every night after dinner. For them, these girls aren’t just hot chicks that like sex. They’re in love. I’m in a room of a million John Hinckleys.
Those guys aside, there are a surprising amount of couples. The couples tend to like the seminars. Topics include “Webcamming for Fun and Profit,” “Lesbian Sex 101,” “Is Polyamory for You?” and “The Legend of Ron Jeremy.” James Bartholet hosts a few seminars. He tells lame sex jokes, but he does say he’s proud to say he’s 52 and still making adult movies. In a seminar car “Inside the Porn Actor’s Studio XXX,” he talks to Digital Playground’s Riley Steele. She says she likes orgies. She describes making a mould of her vagina for a ‘fleshlight.’ She says she tries it on boys, switching back and forth between her actual vagina and the mould, and people find it surprisingly realistic. “I was afraid of getting the mould at first,” she says, because she thought they would take a mould of the inside. Gross.
During Jeremy’s lecture, he talked about how the Internet was ruining the porn industry, how he always had to be the bottom guy during DP and always got semen on his thigh, and how he had been in a film called “87 and Still Bangin’.”
On the main stage, there’s an assortment of adult entertainment, from strip performance to game shows. The game show challenges include things like, “insert your finger into your anus and then let us smell it to prove it was in your butt.” “Now, for your challenge, you have to suck that finger.”
This is America, my friends.
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Sipping on our Playmate energy shots to keep us excited about being inundated with dildos, we stayed at the convention about five hours. Here are the highlights:
- A lot of porn chicks don’t look as hot in person as they do airbrushed and posed correctly on DVD box covers. Belladonna is not one of those girls. She is pretty as fuck and ultra-nice. She does a silks performance during the convention and has her own circus tent where perverts line up for a hug and a photo. I am one of those perverts. She’s charming, natural and nice.
- A chemist who formulated his own lubricant because he didn’t like the unnatural products in the lube his wife was using.
- Rubber Doll, a latex fetish model/performer who pantomimed pulling a flower out of her vagina, grinded a metal strap-on until sparks flew out at the crowd and put people in stocks. Particularly original for fetish stuff, no, but she is soooooo hot.
- The two male strippers—Ace and Georgio—who spend most of their teases throwing women around like dainty rag dolls. And then dry humping them.
After the convention, we stopped at a greasy spoon where every employee seemed to hate working there and you got more food than three reasonable people should be able to eat in any setting. We found that our hotel had a Bollywood performance, because, like I said, we were at the WRONG hotel. When we finally got to the Sheraton, it was basically a bunch of scantily clad girls and what appeared to be every Jersey stereotype. I’ve never really watched Jersey Shore, but now I never need to. A woman named Tasha had Andy and I feel her fur vest (over the breasts) to verify its fake softness, then told us I should check out her partner’s fisting paintings in the morning. They invited us back to their place, but we declined and left. On the way out, two girls standing outside in the chilly East Coast fall were only wearing towels.
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Tomorrow is Saturday. The emcee, Dan Diamond, has promised it’ll be wilder than the night before. The plan is to head to Manhattan to Sapphire New York.
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