CLUB FUCK! OR BUST

In the early 90s, I was writing for an underground Los Angeles magazine called Film Threat Video Guide. This gritty rag, covering ultra-indie movies, often shot on video or Super 8 or 16mm, was an offshoot of the trailblazing Film Threat magazine itself, which covered slightly more mainstream indie films. Under the seditious direction of editor-cum-creator Chris Gore, the mag had migrated from Detroit to California a few years previously, and was being published by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler.

I used to love writing for that mag, from a small post-industrial Scottish town, no less. You couldn’t have gotten any further from Hollywood. I wrote aboot stuff like Jorg Buttgereit and Jim VanBebber movies, and remember reviewing an early Uwe Boll film (Amoklauf) in German without subtitles before anybody knew who he was. You get the idea. At that time, I was friends with the editor of the Video Guide, Dave Williams, and he would send me stuff they’d been sent in PAL format because, using NTSC, they couldn’t easily view them. Being an underground film fan, and hating the British Board of Film Classification, I was in hog heaven – a young punk-loving guy writing aboot obscure horror and underground films, getting free tapes, and even getting paid a small amount (as I recall) for it. Life couldn’t have gotten any better!

In 1992, I worked a shitty job as a janitor at the BP Chemicals (now Petrineos) plant in Grangemouth for seven months to get the money for a trip out to Los Angeles. And when I say shitty, I mean shitty - cleaning toilets after gangs of working men was when I discovered that sweetcorn does not digest in the human body. Still, it was a means to an end, and I got what I wanted and needed. I quit the job in July with no regrets whatsoever and jetted off to LA with three high school friends, Andrew, Stephen, and Wee Dick.

We got shown round the Film Threat offices at the Flynt building by the amiable, now-legendary Chris Gore (Film Threat was basically the first mag of its kind, in a market now stuffed with sites and mags dedicated to underground and indie film), which was cool, before Dave Williams drive us out to Las Vegas in a rental car for an overnight stay. This was a personal pilgrimage to me, because I was a massive fan of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at the time (still am) and was dying to see if some of the landmarks Hunter S Thompson had written aboot were still there. Some were, and I got my photo taken at the revolving bar from the book and film. Had to drink Jim Beam, cos there was no Wild Turkey to be found, but you work with what you have got on the run. On that leg of the trip, I was wearing a Drug Enforcement Agency hat, and an Uncle Duke ‘Death Before Unconsciousness’ teeshirt. Ah, youthful sartorial anti-fashion choices! Chuckling here.

I was staying for three weeks, my friends for two, and we were staying in a motel just off Hollywood Boulevard whose name I can’t recall (in checking back, it might have been Hollywood 7 Star Motel, but it’s a long time ago). It was right next to a place called Limelite Liquor, where a guy who served us told us that his town was twinned with Stirling in Scotland. Also saw a big black guy with a large knife down the back of his trousers walking by just outside. Definitely a different world than Falkirk. The world premiere for Universal Soldier, the shitey Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren film, was held round the corner when we were there, at Mann’s Chinese Theater, but we didn’t even go and heckle. Can’t remember why, not like us.

Now as I said, I was staying on a week longer than my friends, as I didn’t have a job to go back to and they did. On the last night I was there, they went to go out to some more of the obscure bars we had been attending with Dave Williams, of the type you see in the film Swingers, where there are no signs outside and you have to know where they are to attend. I had other things in mind. I had read in the Video Guide of a very-fun-sounding place called Club Fuck. The FTVG had a review of it, saying that there were women walking round in fetish gear, gaffer tape on the nipples, fun sick sex games, etc.

I was sold! This sure as shit wasn’t like anything you would see in Falkirk. Though I have never been into BDSM in any way, you can see the attraction: when in Rome, do as the deviant Angelenos do. Certainly better than attending the taping of some shitey television show or something. My friends and I were huckled onto a bus once from Hollywood Boulevard to be in the audience for The Carol Burnett Show, which was aboot celeb impersonators. She had a tranny Madonna just as hot as the real thing – be funny to see it again, see if I could see us on it. Probably not.

Anyway, long story short, my three pals went off gallivanting, leaving me to my own devices, drinking vodka and telling them “If I die tonight, this is how I want to go.” I don’t know why I came away with such melodramatic shite. I certainly didn’t want to go back to Falkirk, to be honest, but dying at a fetish club was also not for happening. So they fucked off – not sure if they were with Dave or not – and I battered in aboot the voddy and called a cab. I had gotten the address of the club from Chris Gore, who had written the review, as I recall (may be wrong), and got ready to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Fuck!

So the taxi driver pulled up, a Mexican guy, and I got unsteadily into the cab. I didn’t think I was going to have the courage to go to the place straight, so I had had more than a little Dutch courage. Putting it mildly, I was totally fucking wasted. I gave him the address, which I had written down, and slumped into the passenger seat. I was dressed, as I recall, in black dress trousers and shoes and a white shirt – conservative, but fetish gear was in pretty fucking short supply in Falkirk back then, even as it is now. I certainly wasn't aboot to go sticking gaffer tape up my arse! And off we drove into the balmy LA summer evening.

And drove and drove. I was in a bit of a stupor, but eventually realised, after a wee while, that something was feeling wrong. The meter was ticking and I started to get a wee bit suspicious. After all, the address was written down, so the guy knew exactly where we were going, or should have. I had us stop and asked a young guy in his 20s through my window where Club Fuck was.

“Well ordinarily I would, honey, but tonight I’m a little tired.”

Jesus! He thought I was sexually propositioning him!

“Thanks. Drive on!”

So we drove. And drove. I was beginning to think fuck, I’m putting this guy’s kids through college, as no doubt I was. Guy probably thought he’d take the drunk gringo for a ride for as long as he could. (The only time I ever feel I got a straight cab ride fare-wise in LA was when I got in the back of a cab with a cabbie who smelled of booze, and who had empty beercans strewn over the floor in the back. Still, he charged fairly, and I wasn’t killed, so that was fine) I saw a shoesehine boy and asked the driver to pull over. I asked the kid where Club Fuck was, thinking that somebody working on the street might have local knowledge. Genius thinking for somebody totally shitfaced.

“Oh yeah, Club Fuck,” he said instantly, and gave a set of not-too-complex directions to the cabbie. I thanked him, and off we set again. And drove and drove. For fucking ages. This was getting beyond ridiculous, so I decided to try finding the place one more time before going back and finding my friends. I had the cabbie pull over one more time next to a small group of black women, and got out of the cab. Unsurprisingly, given the fact I was totally drunk, and had not had the years living in America to practice my accent that I would have years down the line, I had a bit of trouble communicating with the two people I had asked for directions, and the driver himself. I was determined to make myself understood, and walked across to the women…whom I instantly saw were a group of transvestites. I asked one of them if she knew where Club Fuck was. She said she did, and I made her get in the back of the cab to direct us, along with one of her pals (they were round six feet and big girls too!) who was hitching a ride to that part of town.

We got to where we were going pretty quickly, with the driver saying nothing. The tranny I had spoken to got out of the cab, as did her pal, and went over and spoke to another black woman. She came across to the rolled-down car window. In her 30s, she was a real woman this time. Wonders would never cease! She leaned in:

“I’ll do ya, honey, I’ll do ya!”

“No! Club Fuck! I’m looking for Club Fuck! Is that it?” I pointed to a bar or something nearby, people talking, smoking, light and music spilling out, the usual. She nodded in confusion. “Thanks!”

I paid the cabbie his pendejo's ransom and got out, walking past the black hookers as the cab pulled away, and walked into the place. It was a fucking pool hall. In my drunken, fevered mind, I had decided it was a gay pool hall, full of trannies and deviants and maniacs, and I had to get the fuck out of there. But not before using the bogs, cos driving for ages had meant that I was bursting for a pish in the cab. So I used the toilet, unmolested, sucked no glory hole dick, walked as casually out as I could….and ran like fuck away from the place (laughing as I type this) for several blocks until I was well enough away to feel that I could relax.

Eventually I just hailed a cab and went back to the motel and passed out, never having experienced the mythical sexual wonders and splendours of Club Fuck. Just doing brief research there, I see the place hosted people like Bob Flanagan, aboot whom the excellent documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist was made. But I would never know what dark, twisted delights the place might have held for me that drunken, hilarious, confused could-be-Cenobite night: “What’s your pleasure, Mistah Cotton?”

It was only the next day, when everybody else was away and I sobered up, that I thought aboot how that poor, confused, concerned cabbie must have perceived me that night. I mean, for all he knew I was trying to get a hooker, and had stopped, variously, to ask a young white man, a young Chicano teenage boy, black transvestites, and a black woman aboot ‘Club Fuck,’ which, to him, may have sounded like really blatant code for sex, instead of an actual bona-fide, ride-free place. So he would may thought I was gay, a pederast, a tranny-fanny-fancier, and a black woman chaser. White meat, brown meat, black meat, a big tasty cunt-and-cock-and-buttock buffet! I wonder which of them he thought I was most into? And you know what? I wouldn’t have been able to give him an answer, never having tried any of them, before or since.

Still laughing.

Hope you liked it.


THE END

PS: Film Threat still exists in online form, for anybody interested in new indie or obscure films: https://filmthreat.com/