25 Years Later: Bette Davis and The 6th of October

Miss Davis with one of her many beloved dogs, Tibby.

As I look back on my life, the profound significance of October 6th is truly awesome. It all began when I was just over a a year old: although unbeknownst to me at the time, October 6th, 1982 was the commercial release date of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody”. I don’t think I need to detail the impact that the first rung on Madonna’s ladder would ultimately lead to in my own life. 

Exactly one year later was the more profound October 6th for me. That was the literally awesome day when I met my newborn sister Jennifer for the first time, just before she came home from the hospital. I've been blessed to share most of my life journey with her, for she truly became my first and most defining friend. 

On October 6th, 1991, our dog Frisky came into the lives of Jen and I, soon to be joined by her equally beloved sister Chloe. And they changed us both forever. 

In the interim between the October 6th milestones that saw Jennifer and Frisky become defining parts of my time here on Earth, there was the October 6th when the whole world lost an artist and a heroine and gained an angel and a Goddess. It is no exaggeration to say that my life would never be the same. 

I refer to the October 6th of 1989, and to the death of Bette Davis.

Looking back as an adult, and verifying my theories via a calendar for 1989, I can surmise that my family was spending Columbus Day weekend on Cape Cod. We took two cars to get there from where we lived at the time, and my Mom and my sister and I left after my Dad, who arrived at the house while we were still en route. I still remember my mother getting the call on the vintage car phone in our station wagon. It was my Dad, telling my Mom to tell me that Bette Davis had died. The news must have just broken, and I can imagine that that night it would have been all over CNN, which I remember him always watching. The next morning, there was a gorgeous photograph of her face on the front page of The Boston Herald when I came downstairs for breakfast. I vividly remember that moment of seeing that newspaper and, internally, making peace with the finality of her passing. And for nearly ten years, the photo that they selected was immaculately recreated in my memories, too. But I can no longer definitively recall which photograph it was, for I went on to become such an enamored fan that that part of my memory was eventually lost among hundreds of beautiful still photos of Miss Davis that I have since laid eyes on. I strongly believe it was either the most iconic photograph used in the promotion of William Wyler's The Letter or a publicity shot of Bette as Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. I have trace memories of slightly longer hair, like Margo’s, yet with her face sparkling in that indescribable way it always did during the best years at Warner Bros. Either way, she looked utterly beautiful splashed across the whole cover of one of her hometown's two biggest newspapers.

I loved Bette Davis at the time that she died, which was why my father wanted my mother to be the one to break the news to me. But I had a narrowly focused way of showing idol worship at that age, for I was apt to be intensely fixated on only one era in a person’s career. In the case of Diana Ross, my favorite singer at the time, my obsession was all-consuming and yet relegated exclusively to her years with The Supremes. I worshipped Diana, but only as I would have in the 1960s, as if her incredible solo career had not even happened. (Thankfully, I got to enjoy the rest of her magnificent career many years later!) In the case of Bette Davis, I was fascinated and in awe of who she was in the 1980s, as opposed to any decades prior. This was based largely on the impact of being introduced to her via John Hough's infamous/brilliant Disney horror film The Watcher In The Woods. I had not only not been afraid of Bette Davis, as many traumatized members of my generation apparently were, but came away adoring her and apt to rewatch the film, and her performance, repeatedly. 

My adoration of Bette Davis was also based on her priceless talk show appearances. I gather that her ventures into late-night television were always legendary, but they seemed to take on a new air of importance in the 1980s, when she did not let her unbelievably debilitating stroke stop her from electrifying TV audiences with vivid recollections and a razor sharp wit. There was a relevance to the fact that the indomitable Bette Davis should come back from suffering a double mastectomy, a stroke, and a broken hip all within a year to still be the greatest star on the planet. The stroke dramatically affected her ever-copied persona, inhibiting her oft-imitated speech and limiting her defining use of body language. But she soldiered on, proving to the public that nothing could stop Bette Davis. She unconsciously formed a whole new set of mannerisms and speech patterns after the stroke, and it was this grande dame persona that I fell in love with as a child.

The place where I fell in love with Bette was, beautifully enough, Cape Cod, where her theater career blossomed at The Cape Playhouse. It was in Cape Cod where I have the most vivid memories of endlessly rewatching The Watcher In The Woods as well as seeing Bette on TV one afternoon thanks to a late-night TV appearance that my father taped for me the night before. (Like that fateful newspaper cover whose image has dimmed in my memories over the years, I cannot say with any certainty which Bette Davis interview(s) I watched as a child, because I have seen so many since.) And indeed it was en route to Cape Cod that I learned that the incredible life of Bette Davis had come to an end.

The Cape Playhouse, as photographed in 2010 for Cape Cod Today.

About nine months after Bette died, my family and I lost our beloved Grandma Mary, an “adopted grandmother” who had been as integral a part of my and my sister's childhood as both of our biological grandmothers. Grandma Mary’s death was the first loss to hit so close to home. Seven years later, my father lost his mother, and less than two months ago, my mother lost her mother. My sister and I have since found ourselves living in a world without the physical presence of the three matriarchs of our childhood and adulthood. These three losses in many ways are the defining signposts of my personal timeline up to this point. And the loss of Bette Davis preceded all three of them. 

I had already been fascinated with the concepts of life and death and differing perceptions of reality at an extremely young age. But the passing of Bette Davis was the first time my life was consciously affected by death. I was saddened and yet neither afraid of nor confused by the death of Bette Davis. Whether because of upbringing, intuition, or some profound spiritual influence, I put emotions aside and accepted the idea of life ending with death despite, or perhaps because of, a belief in the immortal spirit. My perspective on the sharp distinction between physical and spiritual death has never wavered. I do not feel guided in this by doctrine or delusion or fear, but rather by an internal understanding that has remained with me for as long as I remember being alive. I cannot say that Bette's death fully prepared me for any of the subsequent losses yet to be endured, but I believe that my actively accepting the notion of Bette Davis in spirit has absolutely guided me in the ensuing quarter century.

The back cover of the 1962 first edition of The Lonely Life.

I suppose you could say that I have always considered Bette Davis to be the standard-bearer for all of humanity. But it was not until a decade after her passing that I actually dove into her filmography. In 1999, I read her last book, This ‘n That, saw many of her classic films, and even wrote about Bette Davis (along with Madonna and Dario Argento) for an essay that apparently helped get me accepted into Emerson College. In the mid-2000s, a number of DVD releases reignited my interest in her career and prompted my finally reading her earlier autobiographies, The Lonely Life and Mother Goddam. I ADORED both books, but it was The Lonely Life that offered an unprecedented insight into the mind and heart of an individual who was far more like me than I could ever have realized simply by watching her films or even her dazzling interviews. I feel that I reaffirmed a deep spiritual bond with Bette Davis when I read The Lonely Life at the age of twenty-four. It has since become my favorite book, and based on what I have learned in the ensuing years, I believe it offers a very strong suggestion that Bette Davis was, like myself, an individual with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Bette's unrelentingly honest insights into her all-consuming drive, obsessive perfectionism, constant desire to work, and lifelong struggles with personal relationships were as relatable to me at twenty-four as they still are at thirty-two. These shared traits are also part of what  lead to my being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism. There is much discussion online, thanks to communities like Wrong Planet and one of my personal heroes, Rudy Simone, about the nuances of ASD in individuals like myself and many female Aspies who "hide it" underneath a protective veil of feigned charisma. We may never know if Bette Davis was on the autistic spectrum, but based on evidence left behind, I believe she was. And I believe that that makes her an even greater role model to millions of people just like me.

Aside from being the greatest of artists and finest of human beings, Bette Davis epitomized Joseph L. Mankiewicz's notion of "a great star". I must admit that Bette has even eclipsed Madonna as my favorite star--but Madonna is, of course, a very close second! It really is something that Bette's best films, from any given era of her career, still entertain new generations of viewers in the exact same way that they did upon their initial release. And thanks to Bette's impeccable taste and domineering influence, her best films still hold up on artistic merits, too. In her work and in her life, Bette underlined the role that a brilliant mind plays in being "a great star" versus merely "a celebrity". I take stardom very seriously because of Bette Davis. And I would argue that every culture benefits from stars who break barriers and inspire masses, which Bette Davis did in spades both during, and indeed long after, her incredible lifetime.

Thank you for everything, Miss Davis. XO

FYI File: Fantasy, Nostalgia, and "The 2014 Project"

Now that this blog has been given its third and final (I swear!!) name, I thought I would shake things up a bit. Nothing so crazy as dropping the pink text color or updating the general appearance to a post-1997 look, of course. But there's a lot I've been wanting to say, so rather than post a succession of lengthy blog posts, I thought I'd post this variety pack of short ones. 

The Twentieth Anniversary of My Obsession With Anniversaries

The hits package that redefined my life. Like, seriously!

January '14 marked the 20th anniversary of my obsession with anniversaries. My first-time viewings of Starman, The Shining, Dawn of the Dead, and Working Girl on blistery and/or snowy Friday nights in January '94 mobilized in me a 1980s nostalgia that never went away. But it wasn't just the movies I watched that month, it was also buying THE album: Totally 80s, the 2-CD Razor & Tie compilation that was advertised on TV all the time before becoming the soundtrack to most of my life in the sixth grade. From 1994 on I was fetishizing every aspect of '80s pop culture while lambasting everything I could about the '90s. However, happy Friday nights ritualistically spent at the local multiplex limited my aptness for thrashing then-contemporary film. 

It is now a time capsule for what the world looked like in March '94,

but The Paper also remains grown-up Hollywood fare at its most brilliantly entertaining.

For the Class of 2000, 1994 was the year when the sixth grade ended and the seventh grade began. Thus the year closed with my being knee deep in adolescent angst, which only kept me going back into the past. I continually found myself disappointed by reality, so I was constantly choosing fantasies that were constructed in another era. My pre-pubescent childhood had been so happy, and the spirit of the '80s was so inextricably linked to my own soul, that I lamented the decade until it became an over-idealized Heaven that I dreamed of dying and going back to. I was not unaware of this being unhealthy, but that didn't make it any less painful to push forward, not when I discovered that being a teenager was to be a lot less pleasant than I had been imagining in the '80s. Instead of forging a new path that would make childhood dreams come true, I clung to the past as an escape while reality came crashing down in the present. And, for better or for worse, I've been inclined to do this ever since.

I related to Tess McGill when I was twelve. I still do now.

And I'll bet many of you reading this feel the exact same way.

A Sorta-Facade On The Verge of Sorta-Crumbling

There has been so much that I have wanted to communicate through this blog over the last fifteen months, but during said fifteen months my life has been in a major state of upheaval. Actually, it was in upheaval when I started this blog back in 2011. But way back then, things in my life were just starting to turn upside down, and the coinciding mini-phenomenon of “Vogue Boy” allowed me to escape reality like never before. For a moment in Summer '11, it felt like my dreams of being an artist and a star had been instantly realized when that video achieved its peak popularity in one weekend. It was during that delightfully manic moment that I quickly decided to become a blogger, and my early entries here are thus defined by an optimism, and even a sense of fulfillment, that apparently represents me at my purest.  

The-blog-formerly-known-as-RobWorld has been a tremendous outlet in the three years since since then, for it has allowed me to unlock and release parts of myself through the written word in a way that I could never do within the format of a screenplay. But for well over a year, I have not been inclined to do any unlocking or releasing, for I have discovered that my life experiences are a lot less vivid in my mind after I make them public here. And, as evidenced in past entries, my memories, and the role they play in shaping my creative output, are too precious to me to be sacrificed.

On some level, I've gotten more screenwriting done by not blogging. But on most levels it has denied me an outlet that I need: not only to write, but to be read. I might not have a huge readership on here, but the feedback I've received in personal messages has been too awesome to be ignored. There is no better feeling than knowing a handful of people were affected by work that they personally related to, or which made them look at a movie or a person or a similar life experience in a new light. I don’t know if I’ll start writing again more regularly, because I thought that that would be the case last November....and it wasn’t. But I think this has a lot to do with my wanting to make every post an event, in turn defeating the purpose that this blog serves, for me, in the first place. I am a hopeless neurotic, still in the middle of a challenging and annoyingly long life chapter, and I need a place to let all this shit out. Some people go to therapy. I go to the stage. And that’s exactly what this blog is to me.

From Sixteen To Thirty-Two: "The 2014 Project"

Like the film itself, I'll NEVER forget the first time I saw this trailer!

When I was sixteen, I realized that Wes Craven's Scream was released exactly eighteen years after John Carpenter's Halloween, which itself had been released exactly eighteen years after Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Years later, I would realize that Val Lewton and Jacque Tourneur's Cat People’s limited release in December 1942 meant it was the movie that launched this every-eighteen-years cycle. Since then, I’ve been anticipating "The 2014 Project", a film that would, like the aforementioned four films, inject the horror-viewing experience with enough wit and suspense to change the cinematic landscape and redefine the genre for another two decades.

The most bewitching of Hollywood films and

possibly the most influential horror movie ever made.

Since the late '90s, I have secretly hoped that the Universe would see fit to choose me to write this 2014 horror film, and much of my creative life has been spent preparing myself to be worthy of such an opportunity. Alas, I've proven far more adept at writing screenplays than actually getting them made into movies. And without ever seeing your work on some screen, one can hardly feel like a real screenwriter. So last year I attempted to put work of which I remain as proud as ever temporarily behind me, and to instead take a stab at crafting "The 2014 Project". I spent the entirety of 2013 working on eight different scripts, each of which I had hoped could potentially reinvent "the American horror film", but none of which ever made it to their respective finish lines. By New Year’s Eve, I was forced to admit defeat. I was proud of the work I had done, and confident that one day the characters and story elements from this arsenal of partial completion would find their way into my future projects. But by no means did I come close to striking the gold that I was digging for.

If every attempt at crafting a pure suspense picture was even half

as effective as Halloween, the world would be a much better place.

It was not until the very end of 2013 and the very beginning of 2014 that a burst of renewed inspiration and ambition (my favorite cocktail) launched me on a new path. My dream, in this easy-to-shoot-but-hard-to-distribute world of modern indie filmmaking, was that the work flowing out of me would find its way into the right hands, and a quickly-realized project (Cat People, Psycho, Halloween, and Scream were themselves low-cost/high-speed shoots) could theoretically find its way onto a VOD platform or into an early 2015 film festival. But nearly a third of the way into 2014, I'm inclined to believe that that dream will not come true....and I'm okay with that. It’s very likely that a great horror film will come along and make the impact I was hoping to make while I'm still pining away, and if that happens, I can finally say I was right all along. And hopefully, if that happens, 'my little horror film', whenever it makes its way to the screen, will still earn itself a place in the hearts of like-minded movie lovers. But for now, I think I'll put my faith in "The 2032 Project": I have good reason to believe I might be capable of writing something worthy of comparison to the aforementioned films when I'm fifty. In the meantime, I intend to enjoy the writing process instead of mourning my failure to be where I thought I would be when I was half the age that I am right now. 

No movie-going experience has come close to the first two times I saw Scream on the big screen. And I'm 99.44% sure that this will always be the case.

Furthermore, assuming that the every-eighteen-years cycle really does extend into this century, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for the film that will ultimately redefine our collective concept of modern horror movies. There are already a few potential contenders in the pipeline, and 2014 has only just begun...

Me '93 On The Future Of American Horror Movies

Today marks twenty-five years since the U.S. release of Gary Sherman’s Poltergeist III, a film that has been derided far too much over the last quarter century. It bombed at the box office before terrifying a generation of small-screen viewers (specifically, my generation), and is most infamous for being released four months after the death of its lead actress, Heather O’Rourke. An unbelievably talented child star who would have evolved into a truly great adult star, Heather O’Rourke was so synonymous with the role of "Carole Anne Freeling" that her tragic death before filming was complete seems almost like a ghastly extension of this uniquely nightmarish film. Although savaged by critics upon its initial release, I assume that it has since earned itself a place high in the ranks of 80s cult horror films. It’s as frightening a picture as Gary Sherman’s earlier 80s gems, the darkly comic voodoo masterpiece Dead and Buried and the gritty prostitution thriller Vice Squad. The cast is uniformly exceptional, especially the pitch-perfect performances by its two late stars. Heather O’Rourke was at her most controlled and impressive by the third film, and once again Zelda Rubinstein expertly walks the fine line between genius and camp as filmdom’s most famous medium: the legendary “Tangina”. Despite its stellar performances and effectiveness as a relentlessly claustrophobic and surreal horror film, it does have its fair share of unintentionally hilarious shortcomings. This is best illustrated in this priceless (negative) review of the film by the late, great Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert, arguably one of the funniest segments ever broadcast on their classic TV series. 

Poltergeist III was a film that I did not see until my life-changing Summer of 1991. For years I’d only been allowed to either gaze at the 80s horror movie covers at the video store or “settle” for classic movies of the 30s and 40s like Bride of Frankenstein and I Walked With A Zombie. But then one day near the end of the third grade my Dad told me he would let me see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho if I put more effort into Little League. (I was never one for sports, so movie privileges were often an incentive during my thankfully brief baseball chapter.) I can’t remember if he showed it to me or I watched it by myself, as I most remember subsequently watching it over and over that summer. I was not frightened, but I LOVED everything about it, and consider it a great blessing that the film which birthed modern horror should be my own starting point. Viewing Poltergeist and its sequels followed shortly thereafter. Like Psycho, I watched the Poltergeist movies so many times that summer that memories of the repeat viewings all absorb into one another. But unlike Psycho, the Poltergeist movies freaked me out.

Two years later, my wonderful 5^th grade teacher, Mrs. Quinn, had everyone in class create our own magazines. My magazine was called Boston Entertainment, and was a mish-mash of Entertainment Weekly and Premiere Magazine—literally. I spliced ads from both into my magazine, along with a few reviews by my favorite local film critic, James Verniere of The Boston Herald, with full credit of course. In addition to the collage of cut-outs and capsule reviews, the magazine contained a number of articles which I wrote myself, including this one about the future of the American horror film. I rediscovered this “magazine” in my parents’ attic and thought I would share my favorite article in honor of Poltergeist III's 25th Anniversary and Boston Entertainment's 20th (!) anniversary. I still remember the urgency with which I wrote it: as someone who aspired to make horror films, I felt that my own future was at stake. I wanted to insure that a market would still exist when I was old enough to make my dreams come true, and my fears in those dismal days of early 90s horror were all too valid. The genre has come a long way since. But now corporate influence, economic turmoil, changing technology, and unprecedented piracy are all drowning out the voices of independent filmmakers. Indeed, there is once again reason for those of us pursuing a career in horror films to proceed with caution. And so, without further adieu, here is another blast from my past, peppered with a bit of present-day commentary . 

My lone foray into magazine publishing. 

                                                                   The Horror of Horrors:

                                                                     Will Scary Movies Be

                                                                     Here For Us To Look

                                                                                Back On?

                                                                                                  By Robert Jeffrey

                Have you ever heard of “Jaws”? You probably have, because it IS a classic. Still, have you ever heard of the movie “Leprechaun”? In my opinion, it is a true horror, blending comedy and scary special effects to make it perfect, but just the title probably sounds strange to you, although some people are familiar with it. “Jaws” was a box office smash, but “Leprechaun” was out for less than a week in Peabody.

Alas, I would never again rave on about Leprechaun 

as much as I did at the age of eleven.

                These are just two examples of what people may realize is happening in theaters, or may not care to notice. What is it that makes a horror movie popular? Is it special effects, suspense, black humor, or a hip, cool style? The reason I don’t mention a “foundation” such as a bestselling novel is because many Stephen King movies, such as “The Dark Half”, are movies that are not only bombs at the movies, but I don’t even consider most of them to be real horrors.

Sorry, I don't know why I was so mean to Stephen King adaptations! Worse yet, I hadn't even seen The Dark Half when I wrote this--and it's a GREAT movie.

                Maybe special-effects is the way to go. In the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, part three made forty-seven million (1987), and part four made forty-nine million (1988). Both of these movies were the most popular of the “Nightmare” movies, and these were both crammed with mind-boggling special effects. Still, other movies like “Dr. Giggles” also had fairy gory special effects, but it didn’t quite pack ‘em in the aisles.

I haven't seen Dr. Giggles since childhood, and it MIGHT be a terrible movie... 

but, to this day, I still LOVE the ad campaign! 

                Maybe it is a campy style. In the movie “Fright Night” which starred Fox 25 regulars William Ragsdale of “Herman’s Head” and Amanda Bearse of “Married…With Children”. I found this 1985 movie which was supposedly a hit at the ticket booths to have real wit, suspense, comedy, some great FX, and camp. Yes, I found this movie to have really cool style that most Stephen King horrors miss by a mile, which made this one of my favorite, if not my very favorite, horror movies. Still, some hated this movie, so don’t rely on modern gimmicks.

My #1 favorite scene in my #1 favorite vampire movie of all time. 

(I think it's safe to say I still love Fright Night as much as I did at eleven.)

                Maybe it is suspense. Lots of suspense movies get better reviews by critics and make more money at the box office than some horrors. Still, that doesn’t mean horrors don’t have suspense. The classic “Jaws” was not only one of the biggest (meaning made the most money) movies of all time, but it keeps audiences on the edge of their seats. Another horror noted for its superb suspense was the terrifying “Halloween”. Not only was the music in this just as bad as “Jaws”, but its great acting by Jamie Lee Curtis (“My Girl”) and Donald Pleasance (The 1979 version of “Dracula”) and its plot that WAS creative at this time, the movie is excellent.

The night I saw Halloween deserves its own blog post, 

because it's been one of my biggest cinematic/life influences ever since. 

                As we see, there are lots of good reasons to see a horror, but if you see a bad one, the rest you’ll see will be bad too. With that in mind, here are the horrors that I consider to be the best (although some have the gore that I don’t usually like):

                                                                Fright Night

                                                                Halloween

                                                                A Nightmare On Elm Street 1, 3, and 4

                                                                Jaws 1 and 2

                                                                Leprechaun

                                                                Dr. Giggles

It would not be until the 6th grade that I saw most of the great American horror films--hence that pitiful list. But with the exception of Dr. Giggles and Leprechaun, I still LOVE those movies, and Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street remains my favorite horror movie of all. 

My Adventures In The Oldest Profession

“High School Honor Student By Day. Hollywood Hooker By Night.” 

My parents’ worst nightmare. My greatest fantasy.

I have always loved movies about prostitutes, and have always related to them in ways that made little sense to others. Maybe it’s because I wanted to please everyone and didn’t feel that I’d done a good job unless I left a room smiling. Perhaps it’s because I felt I had to play so many different roles with so many different people in order to achieve such a goal. Whatever the reason, I definitely loved that tagline from Robert Vincent O'Neill's Angel every time I passed it in the video store. It would not be until the 2003 DVD release that I finally saw the movie and loved it. But by then I’d already formed a fantasy, based on the concept, and on the cover, and on Roger Ebert’s oft-reprinted original review. The movie lived up to that fantasy. I myself could not.

In 2000, I was working at a store that sold rare laserdiscs and DVDs. Before throwing out a batch of semi-defective laserdiscs, the owner asked me if I had ever seen the film pressed onto all of the slightly marred copies: Ken Russel’s Crimes of Passion. Then and now, I am ashamed to say I had not. It was yet another film that I had formed a video store fantasy around, and even my own version of the movie in my head that starred Andie MacDowell and Madonna and had absolutely nothing to do with the plot of the actual movie. I didn’t even know that it was about a career woman who shields herself from heartbreak by masquerading as a streetwalker named “China Blue” and engaging in outrageous encounters.  Seeing the movie was a turning point, not least of all because I better understood where my desire to be a streetwalker came from: I wanted to be wanted, but didn't want to need that.

I don’t remember when I first wanted to be a prostitute, but I do remember when I first put up an ad for myself online. I had been reading about the escort industry and looking into reviews of some of New York’s more popular male sex workers. I even befriended one through a chat room, a nurse from Maine who I could have seen myself falling in love with at the time. I was flagrantly open with friends and even family about my sex industry ambitions because I found nothing about them dishonorable. In my school of thought, being a whore is nowhere near as sinful as being a freeloader. I also felt that it would be an invaluable insight for my writing, a means of understanding some of the “fallen women” in film who had most inspired me and to get a view of life from the other side of privilege. Of course, such an endeavor has since become a stereotype for naïve young college students and overambitious journalists. I could have lost my life. I could also have gotten arrested. Between the two, I would have taken the former: death scares me way less than cops. 

The closest I came to being a male escort was the closest I came to being arrested, and so that’s why I ultimately closed up shop right before the grand opening. I put up an ad online—ahem, on an “AOL Personal Homepage” no less—and included pictures I’d taken of myself looking pouty and sweet. I don’t remember much about my description, but I do remember that my rate was $100/hr. At that time, in 2002, the going rate for male escorts was around $300/hr, so I thought that I might have a shot at establishing a good customer base thanks to being twenty years old and relatively low-priced. I was insecure about being overweight, but even so, I thought I was a bargain. After all, I ALWAYS aim to be fair. 

Rob '02: Trying to sell myself on AOL as a precocious boy next door. 

I was so proud of myself for thinking of my customers that I failed to remember prostitution is illegal in this particular country. I remembered that reality vividly when an “interested customer” called me up and seemed a little too interested in the details of my one-man business operation. So I told him I’d decided to give up being a male escort and, at that moment, I did.

Bette Davis played my favorite screen prostitute of all.

I often regretted not being brave enough to do what I wanted to do in spite of the warnings of everyone in my life and, indeed, the state and federal government of the United States of America. I can admit now that they were right and I was wrong—not because it’s bad to be a prostitute, but rather because I would have been bad at it. I had never even met a sex worker until a visit to Amsterdam in 2006 lead me to one of the most popular male brothels in the city: Singel 21. There I met one of the most interesting fellows I have ever encountered, and the one who made me realize that prostitution was not nearly as appropriate a line of work for me as I hoped it would be.

His name was Zortak, or that’s what it sounded like. Something Hungarian. He was thirty seven and a twenty seven year old Dutchman, the youngest of the employees, was shocked that I wasn’t going off with him. But I didn’t know that I had a choice. Zortak spotted me first, and I thought that it was only right that I should go with him, despite the fact that the twenty-seven year old was beautiful enough to remain in my dreams forever. 

As we enjoyed mixed drinks in the lounge together, I told Zortak that I had such tremendous respect for his profession, and that it had in fact been my dream to be a sex worker. He looked at me in stunned disbelief. I could see that he was at once confused and insulted, so I just smiled and looked at the twinkling city of Amsterdam outside. I had dreamed of being a sex doctor to beautiful male patients. But Zortak's reality was entirely scripted and rooted in money, not sexual adventure. He and his co-workers were all laughing and joking with one another in Dutch while we waited for the room to be free, and I was convinced they were making fun of me. It bothered me because I wanted to be viewed as an ally, not a john, and also because I really wished I’d learned to speak the language before I left America. For a wannabe sex worker like me, nothing could be worse than rejection by Dutch prostitutes. However, a year later, one of my friends said they were probably laughing over the only twenty-four year old in the establishment being a client.

From the moment I walked into the room and until the time I walked out of the place, I put on a show. I got to be Marilyn Chambers, and I got to give back to an experienced sex worker all of the attention and affection that he had given to countless men before me. But that was the problem, too. I was throwing off the whole transaction by playing the part of “desirable one”, and upon realizing this I had to switch gears. That’s where the guilt came in.

Spending time with a sex worker is like getting a massage or a pedicure: you can feel guilty about it, or you can enjoy it. My experience with a prostitute was a combination of the two. After our intimate encounter, we somehow got into a discussion of AIDS minutes before I left. I forget the full context, but I believe that the man who owned the brothel had inherited it from his partner, who had died of AIDS. It was an awkward intrusion of reality, one which instantly burst the fantasy bubble moments before the fantasy was complete. 

As I walked down the steps, I somehow managed to accidentally make a call on my cell phone. I looked and realized someone was on the other line, and it was my best friend’s father. My best friend, I might add, was also my first love. We had broken up six months earlier, but remained as close as ever. With that having been said, I had no intention of calling he or his parents after my evening with a sex worker. All this came about only hours after I had arrived in Amsterdam, so between jet lag, White Widow, and afterglow, my mind wasn’t absorbent enough of the details for me to recall whether my phone got an answering machine or if I actually spoke to his father that night. I’m still convinced that that gorgeous young Dutchman, who took my politeness to Zortak as a rejection, cast a spell to cause the snafu. He could only be a witch, for as I walked back to the hotel that night, his was the spell I was under.