SEXIS WRONG

want you to be a man. You must simply snub her
from now on, and I will tell Bish-mar that you have
found his daughter repressed.”
Thus the prehistoric origins of pretzel-logic, Don Corleone’s
advice to godson Johnny Fontaine, and Freudian theory are
established.
All the cultural byways of cave-man civilization are presented,
including the preferred method of suicide when grieving—
stoning oneself to death. This would seem a less dependable
method than merely throwing oneself off a cliff, but what do
I know? I wasn’t there. Judging from his Cro-Magnon way
with words, the author apparently was. And so we learn that
fucking was the primary form of communication, although it
is admitted that one learned very little about a partner’s inner
life that way. There is even talk of exterminating the humans
who have recently come onto the scene, are fucking like bunnies,
and threaten cave-man existence.
The entire sweep of prehistoric man’s development is compressed
into a single generation: Mongoon (French for “My
Goon?”) emerges from his dirt cave to desert
his wife, Ah-ha-oh, for the mountain whore,
Itchy-ook (add an “n” to the second part of her
name and her character is revealed), founds a
dynasty, lives in a palace, keeps slaves, and—
here’s the topper—sires children who will later
be worshipped by the Egyptians as Isis, Osiris, and Horus.
Finally, the mystery of the Egyptian deities decoded. Not by
some learned, namby-pamby, ivory tower Egyptologist/archaeologist
but by a real, honest-to-goodness pornographer
desperately in need of Haldol, the psychotic’s anodyne.
Within eleven months, Marvin had issued 170 Collector’s
Publications titles. 21 Other publishers routinely published
twice that many within the same time frame, but they had a
staff; Marv did it all by his lonesome and earned his second
million. And then some.
“I printed the dirtiest ones first. Apollonaire’s Autobiography
of a Flea [actually, Apollonaire did not write that English classic
of a bug’s-eye view of human sexual behavior], Pierre Louÿs’
She Devils [Trois Filles et Leur Mere]. The government wasn’t
even on me yet. They hadn’t even noticed. I kept putting the
money I made back into the business. If I kept the millions I’d
made in the first eight months, before the government got on
me and I had to pay it all out in fines and lawyers, I’d be…I’d
be a millionaire, that’s what.” 22
Don’t cry for Marvin. Though smut appears to have comically
affected his reasoning powers, he still had plenty of dough.
Has it become clear that Marvin was a sociopath? “He
doesn’t have much sense of the human emotions the rest of
us have,” a business associate said. “He gives a pretty good
imitation, but there’s no conviction in it. He’s been watching
people all his life to find out how he’s supposed to act. People
talk about his temper, but he even gets angry on cue. He has
no feeling; he has great charm. He can look straight at you,
and smile, and tell you—he can tell you anything.” 23 The rules
applied but not to him. He had to get what he wanted. He
was going to be fleeced if he wasn’t hyper-vigilant. He had
to survive.
Yet he appeared to revel in litigation and infamy. He was, as
often as not, under one federal indictment or another for conveying
obscene material. “Here, look at this,” he told Peter
Collier of Ramparts magazine, holding out a mimeographed
page listing a series of porn titles and their publishers. As
Collier relates, “It is headed, ‘Books On Which Complaints
Should Be Filed,’ and is handed out by Citizens for Decent
Literature, the national censorship organization that is particularly
strong in Southern California [run by that paragon of civic
“Mongoon’s wife was called Ah-haoh,
a name that sounds strange, but
is really exciting and sexual when
grunted passionately.”
virtue, Charles F. Keating, who in the early 1990s became the
fraud poster-boy for the national savings-and-loan debacle].
With something akin to pride, Miller points to the fact that
Collector’s leads the list with 49 Books on Which Complaints
Should Be Filed; his nearest competitor, Greenleaf, is a poor
second with seven.” 24
Earl Kemp, then VP and editorial director for Greenleaf, was
concerned that operators like Miller gave the business a
bad name. “Mr. Marvin Miller has done things that bewilder
me—and gotten away with them. Not only does he pirate
books with perfectly valid copyrights [Ulysses, for example],
but he deals in strange stuff like dildos and the like—in his
mail-order business. I’ve been trying to get our attorneys to
tell me how he gets away with it.” 25
Marvin didn’t sell merely any ol’ sex toy—he sold “A Revolutionary
Sexual-Aid for Men, The Amazing New Improved
UTHAID!”
This unique prosthetic device is designed to
help married men with certain sexual problems
recapture the joys, bliss, and harmony which only
happy sexual relations can bring to husband and
wife.
• Life-like texture.
THE MAN WHO SCREWED THINGS UP 243