American gigolo

It was maybe the most expensive steak dinner in history, one that ended with David Henry Sterry clutching his bleeding hindquarters, pain ripping through his innards, fleeing down Hollywood Boulevard from a tall black man in a SEXY t-shirt. It was early fall, 1974, the 17-year-old’s first night on the streets of LA. High-headed and cocksure in his elephantbell jeans, Rolling Stones tongue t-shirt and red high-tops, he’d gone home with a man who promised him food, and ended up being violently raped. Welcome to Tinseltown.

Next morning a fried chicken restaurant manager-cum-pimp found Sterry crawling around in a dumpster scavenging for food, gave him a job frying foul, and at the end of the week made the kid a proposition he couldn’t refuse, a proposition involving another kind of white meat. Thus, David Henry Sterry began his nine-month stint as a ‘chicken’, a paid pleasurer of women, mostly the bored or unloved suburban variety.

By day he attended Immaculate Heart College studying existentialism with the nuns, by night he worked with a gigolo agency, earning up to a hundred bucks per paging, his only stipulation being no same-sex action. Within months he was making $500 on the cushier engagements, usually sado-masochistic slap jobs done on diaper wearing court judges.

Now, 30 years later, Sterry has written a memoir entitled Chicken – Love For Sale On The Streets Of Hollywood, recounting in scattergun, staccato, multicoloured prose his time spent hanging on the meat rack.

Meat, you may have gathered, is something of a recurring motif in this particular version of the American nightmare.

“It was a very expensive steak dinner,” Sterry says, sitting at a table in the lounge of the Gresham Hotel, still slight and boyish in a pinstripe suit over casual t-shirt, the lines around his eyes and shock of grey sproingy hair the only clues that the guy is fast approaching 50.

“That’s what started me down the road to bein’ a whore, bein’ a rent boy, was being raped like that,” he continues. “It took away my sense of self worth, it took away my sense of being, I just felt utterly worthless and dirty and nasty, that’s what precipitated me on that long road to perdition.”

That road to perdition had begun, like so many others, with the disintegration of the family unit. Sterry’s parents were ex-pat Geordies who embraced the land of opportunity with the kind of religious fervour only immigrant families can, but by the time their kids had reached their teens, the marriage was falling apart, Sterry’s father having become one big seething fist of repression, his mother seeking solace in the feminist movement and the arms of another woman.

“At the beginning of the book, it says my parents are very much the embodiment of the new American dream,” he says. “They came to this country with nothing but the clothes on their back, and after 20 years of hard work and sweat and sacrifice they were getting divorced, totally broke and deep in therapy. The disintegration of my family absolutely led me to Hollywood all alone, abandoned without any sort of support system.”

Why at this stage in his life, 30 years later, did he decide to write about these experiences?

“Well, it was the culmination of a long process for me,” he explains. “After I got out of my time in that life I became a coke addict, I was a sex addict, I was really self destructive, I found that I would continually put myself in these positions of extreme danger that all involved sex.

“I would find myself waking up somewhere in Harlem in some skanky, nasty den of iniquity with a huge guy with a baseball bat looming over me demanding my money, with his heroin addict prostitute girlfriend who had lured me there – it was like I was begging someone to kill me, y’know? I knew that if I continued like that I’d be dead, and I love life, even at the worst times I love life. I didn’t want to die.

“On the outside it looked like I had a great life, I had a wonderful acting career, I was on The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, the television show with Will Smith, I had a beautiful house, beautiful wife – I lost everything. And I got tired of being an actor in this big machine that I didn’t even believe in.”

How did he lose everything?

“Just through my self-destructive nature. I was always spending money on whores and drugs and betraying everybody who was stupid enough to love me. I’d just been dumped by my fiancé, so I had hit rock bottom and I decided, ‘You know what, from now on I’m just gonna be who I am, I’m just gonna say what I was and if people don’t like it, well, what can I do about it?’

“So I sought out all these different therapists, I finally found one who helped me, this hypnotherapist who was a Jungian based practitioner, and as we went through therapy she encouraged me to write about the stuff. So I wrote a very veiled account of my experiences in a novel and I got it to an agent and she really liked the writing and agreed to represent me. And I went out on a date with my agent, and the date went very well and we’re sitting on her bed at four in the morning and she asks me those questions you have to ask these days. She asked me had I had a lot of partners, and I’m like, ‘Well… define a lot!’ And then she asked me, ‘Have you ever been with a prostitute?’ and for the first time in my life I was able to say, in my normal tone of voice, ‘Y’know, funny you should ask. Actually, I was a prostitute!’ And instead of running screaming into the night she said, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, tell me about that.’ So I told her the story and she said, ‘Now that’s the book you have to write. People need to see the story.’ So it was a culmination of long years of recovery on my part, 25 years. That’s a long time to live with that shit inside you.”

Okay, here’s the question most males will want to ask any gigolo. How do you get it up if you can’t get it up?

“Well, I have a lot of friends now who are women prostitutes, sex workers, and people ask me what’s the difference between those two lines of work, and obviously there are many things in life you can fake, an erection is just not one of them…”

The most tragic scenes in Boogie Nights, I suggest, were when Dirk Diggler’s porn career was in decline, as was his extraordinary manhood.

“Yeah, when he’s hired by that guy and he’s trying to get it up in the (car)… oh, it’s such a miserable, horrible scene. Like, the thing that’s defined him as a human being no longer works. Well for me, the first time I ever was on a job I was terrified, just by this thought, ‘What if it’s some horrible beastly woman that I’m just not attracted to, what am I gonna do?’ I was so terrified that I wouldn’t be able to get it up.

“What happened was, when it came time for me to actually perform, this woman crawled up on top of me and she was so emaciated, it was like trying to make love to a bag of dead bones, it was just so not sexual for me. My eyes were closed because she didn’t want me to look at her to begin with, and I was desperately searching in my mind for some sexy kind of image or something, and all of a sudden this soundtrack – my first sexual experiences were watching pornography – and when I closed my eyes I heard this soundtrack like of a porno movie: ‘Yeah, baby you love it baby don’t you, you nasty little thing – wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka, yeah baby’. Kinda like Barry White, y’know, you can imagine.

“But for me that voice was utterly linked with my discovering what sex was, and when I heard that voice it was like all the sexual energy started pulsing through me, and it became like a character, I actually had a name for it, the loverstudguy. And from that point forward whenever I felt myself in danger of losing my power, as it were, I would close my eyes and get that voice working in my head. It was like this room was my own private porn movie and I was the porn stud, utterly removed from my own self, at a distance, like watching myself performing.”

Did that bring about any fallout in his private life?

“It had really dangerous repercussions in my private life. I had a sweet girlfriend named Kristy that I was just mad about, she was wonderful, she was kind of sweet, virginal college co-ed, but then when it was time for me to be intimate with her, I didn’t want to be a loverstudguy with her, I just wanted to be myself, but inevitably when we started kissing and making love, here was that voice again: ‘Hey baby, you love it, don’tcha’ and it was terrible. I was always at a remove from myself during sexuality, it made intimacy almost impossible.”

So there’s a correlation between prostitutes and performers.

“Oh, I think so. A lot of the people I know who’ve been prostitutes have said when they put on their clothes, their outfit, it’s just like an actor getting into costume, and before they walk into that room they get into the character of that part of themselves that is that sexual being, almost that ravenous I-can-do-anything sexually – it’s a very powerful feeling to tap into that part of yourself. Being a rent boy was great training for being an actor later, because to do that kind of work you do have to be a kind of exhibitionist, you have to be able to show yourself and be able to be naked and parade around and go, ‘Look, yeah, here I am, this is it.’ I mean it is show business in a certain way.”

After he quit hustling, Sterry went through more jobs than he can remember: cherry picker (“pickin’ real cherries – in this context it could have many meanings I know!”), marriage counsellor, building inspector, human guinea pig, Chippendales MC, stand up comedian, actor, and now writer. Was he ruined for the straight world after life as a chicken?

“Yeah, it was really hard to go back to working some minimum wage job after being paid a hundred dollars an hour to do this kind of work,” he admits. “I lived in dire abject poverty for five years after that life because I didn’t want to go back into it, it was just too damaging for me.

It seems incredible that the story arc of Chicken takes place over a span of less than a year. Was it hard to revisit these experiences when writing the book?

“Memory is such an interesting thing,” he says. “I have a photographic memory, and it’s a double-edged sword. On one hand you remember everything, but on the other hand, you remember eeeeverything. What’s interesting is the first draft of this book took two and a half weeks to write, I mean it just poured out of me, but it was all visceral, violent language, it was all just a pure description of what happened, and my agent – now my wife – kept saying to me, ‘No, what were you feeling?’ ’Cos it’s not just enough to describe the act, the physical act, or what the room looked like. You wanna know what’s going on inside of somebody’s head. The meat of it, no pun intended, is what’s going on beneath the surface.

“So that was by far the most difficult, each draft I kept trying to get more into the feeling and the thoughts that were going through my brain while I was doing this work, and some of it was incredibly hard, especially the rape scene, to relive again. But in the end, as painful as it was, it was ten times more liberating to get that shit out of me and to exorcise those demons, get ’em onto paper. And when I finally finished the book and sent it off to the publisher, it was like the black cloud that was over my head for 25 years finally was lifted and the sun shined and birds started singing, it really felt like that.”