Out of the Blue Read online

  I woke early the next morning filled with trepidation. We couldn’t possibly have a worse day than the day before, could we? As it turned out, yes we could. Caesar was bottoming that day for an amateur boxer I had found in a local gym and named Brad Rock. Brad was straight and had two little kids. He had a huge cock and the biggest balls I had ever seen in my life. He had very pale skin, very black hair, very red lips and very blue eyes. He reminded me of a malamute. He was incredible looking.

  Brad had starred in my film Hard as Rock, and was quickly becoming a big star. He was supposed to be fucking Caesar. My deal with Caesar was for him to appear in three scenes in the film. One oral with Rhett O’Hara, one fucking Dane Brando and another where he got fucked by Brad Rock. He swore to me his hemorrhoids would be healed in time for him to get fucked by Brad, and I had no choice but to believe him. We all arrived on the ranch and Caesar asked to speak to me.

  “Blue, we have a problem.” I knew exactly what he was going to say; in fact, as he said it, the words seemed to be coming out in slow motion:

  “I caaaan’t geeeeet fuuuucked.” I could feel the top of my head about to explode.

  “WHAT?” I screamed. “Are you trying to ruin my movie!?” My voice echoed around the ranch as the crew and the pack of dogs ran for cover.

  “Hey, it’s not my fault!” shouted Caesar—and it wasn’t his fault of course. Caesar and I stood nose to nose with fists clenched. Andre, my cameraman, told me afterwards he was sure we were going to have a knockdown, drag-out fight.

  “OK . . . ” I hissed between clenched teeth, “This is what we are going to do. We are going to do the oral, fake the fucking, then when your arse is better in a week we are going to shoot the close-ups of insertion.” This was a total fucking pain, but it was the only solution to this nightmare.

  Everybody on the set agreed it was the only way around the problem and with the magic of editing it could be done. The only thing that worried me was that porn stars had a high rate of flakiness. In fact, the flakiness factor rivaled that of a piece of cod. And I was worried that either Brad Rock or Caesar would end up in prison or commit suicide before I could finish filming Cowboy. I know that it sounds heartless, but by this time my heart was made of granite. I had turned into Cecil B. DeBlake and nothing was going to stand in my way of finishing this movie.

  “OK,” I barked, “Caesar and Brad, you’re down in that gorge and Caesar, you’re eating Brad’s arse.”

  “But I think I saw a snake!” said Caesar.

  “Did Jennifer Lopez say that when she was filming Anaconda?!” I screamed. “EAT HIS ARSE!” The gorge was indeed full of snakes, but we kept them away from the actors by having Eddie, my makeup artist, throw rocks to distract them . . . well, until he passed out due to heat stroke and dehydration. It was 110 degrees.

  The oral and arse eating went surprisingly well and we faked all the fucking. Caesar, as if knowing I was at the end of my tether, gave a superb performance and Brad Rock was at the top of his game. There is something extremely sexy about watching two very masculine, straight men kiss. So I made them snog each other’s faces off. I always know when a scene will be hot because I get a hard-on, and believe me; I was gigantic in my pants watching these two studs go at it. I might even have had a wank behind the monitor . . . I don’t remember.

  Finally, after a week we were finished filming at that damn ranch. As we drove away, I noticed the pack of wild dogs fighting over a used condom that had been left behind in the dirt. Bon appetite, Lassie!

  The final scene for Cowboy was shot the next day in my house in Laurel Canyon. I had built a shower that could fit ten people, despite the fact that only two of us lived there. I had seen it in an issue of Homes and Gardens . All made of gothic tile it would serve as the set for a three-way between three bodybuilders: Staten McCor-mack, Ray Stone and Kelly Madison. They had shaved their heads in order to look alike because in the movie they were supposed to portray Caesar’s father, cousin and uncle. They were all showering together in their underwear and then two of them would fuck Kelly Madison. Of course it was ridiculous because who showers in their underwear? But it just looked so sexy. They all had the same kind of bodies and apart from the fact that we ran out of hot water half way through the scene and everybody began to turn blue, everything went without a hitch. Perhaps the curse of this damn film had finally been lifted.

  Years later we sold the house to the actress Julie Bowen. Before she bought the place she told me she showed her friends how beautiful the shower was by playing Cowboy for them and telling them to ignore the naked skinheads and just appreciate the beauty of the Ann Sacks tile inlays.

  A week later Caesar and Brad returned so we could shoot the insertion shots. I had completely run out of money to carry on with this film. I couldn’t even afford to pay the videographer’s day rate, so I snatched up the camera and I shot it myself. As I lay on my back in the dirt and leaves while shooting Caesar’s hole in a really tight shot so that it would match the rest of the footage, I prayed to God that anybody who bought the film wouldn’t notice my amateurish shaky camera work. Luckily, Caesar’s arse had healed and it came off without a hitch.

  That night I replayed the entire movie in my head. I had put my heart and soul into the film so it bloody better make some money.

  In the January 2003 issue of Adult Video News (the porn bible where all the latest gay and straight films are reviewed) Vincent Lambert awarded Cowboy a four and a half star rating out of a possible five:

  “The much hyped and long discussed Blue Blake’s Cowboy rides into town this month. And it is well worth the wait.... Blue Blake’s Cowboy is a neat little thriller. It is lovely to look at. Has a meaty story line, good performances and, most important, hot man action. It is nicely edited by Michael Zen. We even like the catchy “Cowboy” theme song by Rock Hard (Maybe because it sounds like it was inspired by Madonna’s own dancing-cowboy video, ‘Don’t Tell Me’. . . . Pre-noms across the board. . . .”

  That year Cowboy was nominated for numerous Gayvn awards—the porn world’s equivalent of the Oscars. I was personally nominated for three of those awards: Best Movie, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Caesar won Best Actor, he deserved it.... I won bloody nothing!

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN I FIRST BECAME A PORN STAR and did interviews for the press, I would always be asked by the interviewer, “Was it your lifelong dream to be a porn star?”

  And I would always look at them in astonishment and give the same answer, “Absolutely not.”

  It had never even crossed my mind. I was born in July, a Cancerian, one of the least appealing signs of the zodiac, at least to look at. I have a sister who’s a Leo and I would always read her stars in the paper, pretending they were mine. Leos always get:

  “Today is your day, oh beautiful Leo. Blessed child of the shining sun, you will have a day of public worship and everybody will bask in your beauty.” A typical Cancerian quote would read: “Poor unfortunate crab . . . try to keep your chin up, trapped in your plain body.” Well, I didn’t feel like no damned crab, so for years I told people I was a Leo. I even shanghaied my sister’s birth date, August 5th, much to the bemusement of my mother and the chagrin of my sister. Looking back at this, it must have been the start of the reinvention of myself from Nottingham-born Glenn Marsh to London-born Blue Blake.

  Nottingham in the 1960s was a strange mix of Northern charm and gorgeous-looking people. For some reason, they say that the most beautiful women in England are born in Nottingham. One of those girls was my mother, Jean. She had the look of Julie Christie but was 250 miles away from Swinging London, where perhaps she could have been discovered by David Bailey and become the next Twiggy. Instead she worked in a betting shop.

  A betting shop, one of those foul British institutions where you take your hard earned wage packets and fritter them away on some losing nag at the 3:15 in Don-caster. Horse racing, dog racing . . . they’ll take bets on anything. Betting shops always smell of cheap liq
uor, old men and cigarettes—thousands upon thousands of cigarettes. The walls are yellowed by nicotine and the plastic furniture is screwed down in case some drunk who’s lost a week’s wages picks up a chair and hurls it at the nearest cashier. They work behind heavy plastic screens, obviously for their own safety.

  It was in this romantic environment Jean met Victor, my father. Victor looked like a young Robert Wagner but was as dumb as a box of hair. He was beautiful but cruel and self-absorbed. My mother, of course, fell madly in love with him.

  They were married and seven months later I was born. We were incredibly poor or perhaps just very working class. Our first house had no bathroom. The toilet was outside at the bottom of the yard and we didn’t use toilet paper but strips of newspaper torn up and hung on a hook. My father’s mother would drown kittens when her cat got pregnant in the very same toilet. This lasted until I was four when we moved into a house with indoor plumbing.

  My mother was eighteen years old and my father was twenty when I was born. My parents’ marriage was stormy from the very start. On their wedding day my father chased my maternal grandmother around the garden with a carving knife for not ironing one of his shirts properly. It was the shape of things to come.

  When they’d been married for two weeks, Victor, who was perturbed that his tea was cold, threw a twelve-piece tea service through the front room window. The window was closed.

  This was the final straw. Jean may have been beautiful, but she certainly wasn’t stupid. She crammed as many of her belongings as she could into her mini-van and drove home to Mother. Grandma welcomed her with open arms. After all, she was still recovering from her own Olympic sprint around the rose bushes, with crazy Victor in hot pursuit brandishing sharp dinnerware.

  My father was incredibly handsome and my mother was incredibly naïve. So, when he begged her to come home, she did. He promised he would never let his temper get the best of him again . . . until the next time. So began a cycle that would last the next twelve years. My father would have uncontrollable rages and smash things. Once, he smashed six dining room chairs and a dining room table.

  From when I was ten to when I was sixteen years old, we lived in a large, detached house at the bottom of a cul-de-sac . I even remember the address, Twenty-eight Elm Tree Avenue. My parents had by this time made a little money through owning and running a fish and chip shop. The house was spacious and light and had a great staircase that ran down the center of the hall to the front door. I’d blow up an airbed and slide down the stairs at what seemed to my adolescent self like fifty miles an hour.

  I wasn’t an easy child. I weighed nine pounds when born and had a shock of blond hair and blue eyes. Our next-door neighbors called me “killer” because I was always stomping around, getting into trouble. One time, my grandmother left me, foolishly, with her houseguest Lilly, while she went to pay the gas bill. She was only gone ten minutes, but when she returned the house was full of smoke and I was choking under the kitchen table. I had thrown every one of her velour cushions into the fire, along with my favorite teddy bear and all of my argyle cardigans. Strangely, I still to this day don’t own a cardigan. I don’t even like the sound of the word “cardigan.” Any chance I got, I would throw things into her hearth. My grandmother was convinced I was going to be a fireman when I grew up. Personally I think I was just reacting to the madness that surrounded me as a child.

  When I was five years old, I found a can of gold spray paint in the garage. And before you could say, “let’s spray the living room gold,” I had done it, everything: Sofa, chairs, TV screen, wallpaper, even my suede shoes. My mother came home and cried. She took me to a child psychiatrist who told my mother I was just a “free spirit.” This was the Sixties; remember. Meanwhile, I had to be watched like a hawk.

  Behind our house was an enormous sports field that belonged to the local Catholic boy’s school. There was a running track, tennis courts; even a long jump and high jump pit full of sand where we would spend hours building sand castles. The field was about twenty acres, surrounded by houses that backed onto it. In about ten of these houses lived children my age, and we all grew up together, one enormous gang.

  There was Mandy Fob and her brother Grant. Both had some sort of blood disease, which meant they couldn’t do physical education at school and didn’t have to stand in line for school lunches. We teased them about having yellow skin. Children are cruel.

  In the house next door to me lived my best friend Matt Palmer, his younger brother, Clive, and their older sister, Sharon. I remember Sharon was sexy and slutty and she’d let me finger her when we went to the local cinema. She’d pretend to be asleep. I was twelve; she was thirteen. Clive was eleven. He’d let me finger him, too.

  In the house opposite lived Jan Rombie, who was an only child. His parents had him late in life, so he was really spoiled. He was given outrageous amounts of pocket money and bragged that he never had to brush his teeth. At the time, I was insanely jealous. I now realize he probably doesn’t have a tooth left in his head. His parents were chain smokers and their house always smelled like a dirty ashtray. His father bred budgerigars in sheds in the back garden; very successfully, I might add. Every wall in the house was covered in rosettes which read: “Best in Show,” “Best Beak,” “Best Feathers,” etc.

  Jan’s mother was a seamstress, so the house was always full of the noise of birds and the constant whir of her Singer sewing machine. Even so, it was a friendly environment, and an escape from the tense atmosphere in my own home.

  Further down the road lived Patrick Cox and his brother David. Their parents were divorced and they lived with their mother. In their den, they had the only lava lamp I had ever seen and I would beg Patrick to switch it on when I visited. I asked my mother if we could have one and she looked at me as if I’d gone insane.

  Also on the road lived Wanda Fleur, my first girlfriend. She had long, beautiful, shiny brown hair and brown eyes. I was madly in love with her from the age of nine. She also had the best collection of Barbie clothes I’d ever seen. We’d spend hours dressing her dolls in mini skirts and tube tops. It must have been so obvious to her parents that I was gay.

  Further down the road lived Jennie Warmsley. We all called her Jennie “Wormsley.” She never looked clean and their house smelled of Wendy, their pregnant bulldog, and the cigars her mother would smoke. My mother forbade me to play with Jennie, saying I would catch something. Jennie looked like Sissy Spacek in Carrie, sadly bovine. I realize, looking back on it, all my best childhood friends were cute. Even then I was drawn to the cute ones.

  We were all about the same age, except my sister, Victoria, who was eight years younger. My mother would make me take her out with us, so she just automatically became part of our gang. We would pretend to make movies and I would direct and orchestrate the action. We always made action films. My best friend, Matt Palmer, played the hero because he was fearless and was constantly risking his life with the most foolhardy stunts. One day, I had him swing from a tree, holding on to a burning rope, twenty feet in the air while we pretended to film it. We had no cameras. We were just wild kids.

  MY FOUR-YEAR OLD SISTER would insist on playing the vamp . . . at four years old! At the time, it seemed very innocent. It now seems like kiddy porn, without the porn.

  It goes without saying; we were obsessed with films. I went to the movies as often as I could. My local cinema was called The Futurist, and every Saturday morning all the children would run down to watch such classics as Dr. Who and the Daleks and Herbie Rides Again. I lived in the cinema. I was fascinated by the huge drapes which were all lit up to hide the screen in hues of blue and gold and red. I loved the coming attractions, especially if it was summer and a James Bond movie was on its way. In the movie Diamonds Are Forever there is a scene where Sean Connery is naked from the waist up, but it’s shot to suggest that he’s totally naked. He was so buff and furry-chested. I went home and jerked off every night for two weeks thinking about him.

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sp; The first grownup movie I saw was Saturday Night Fever. You had to be eighteen to get in and I was twelve. I went with a group of friends from school and when we snuck in it was like a religious experience. The following night, emboldened by my previous night’s success, I went to see Joan Collins in The Stud; a soft-core potboiler full of women with slipper tits. This was definitely pre breast implants. After that, I was addicted to movies with an X certificate. In England “X” meant over eighteen only. Slowly the movies we pretended to make grew darker and darker until my mother caught us dressing my sister in a polythene mini dress made from a bin liner. She forbade Victoria to play with us anymore saying she was too impressionable. The seeds in me, however, had been planted. I wanted to be a world-famous star. Whatever it would take, I was willing to do.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE YEARS ON ELMTREE AVENUE FLEW BY. Typical teen years of studying, parties and long hot English summers. I was attending a local high school called West Bridgford Comprehensive, which had an amazing drama department and the teachers there encouraged my budding thespian talent. Before I knew it I had turned sixteen and left West Bridgford “High.” In England, to work in the theater or on television, you need an Equity card, which allows you to belong to the entertainment union. You can’t work without one, but they are incredibly difficult to get. However, once you have one the world is supposedly your oyster, and the easiest way to get one is by dancing in cheesy cabaret venues throughout the world. I was sixteen years old and ready to take the acting world by storm. The only problem was I needed that damn Equity card, but I knew just how to go about getting one.