Dark Gig: Inside the World of Murderabilia

Posted on by Team Penthouse

One of America’s leading “Murderabilia” dealers, selling homicide-linked collectibles from his online store, TrueCrimeAuctionHouse.com, Dodge does cop to a fascination with sociopathic minds — especially the minds of killers who acquire a macabre celebrity for their shocking acts. And he adds, “Anyone who knows me knows I have a very dark sense of humor. Every day is like Halloween for me.”

A level of comfort with darkness is not only an asset, given his business, but a necessity. Dodge travels to meet with prisoners on death row. He speaks by phone to multiple murderers weekly. Then there’s his website, where you can purchase Charles Manson’s clipped hair in a glassine bag, a hand tracing from Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez, and an autographed work of art by Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Strangler.

Those looking for an item connected to serial killer Ted Bundy will find a scrap of plastic from one of the green trash bags Utah police recovered from Bundy’s tan VW Bug in 1975—part of Bundy’s “murder kit,” which included handcuffs, an ice pick, a crowbar, gloves, a ski mask, and a mask made from pantyhose.

Some of the goods have an eerie normalcy, like a handwritten recipe for chili con carne from Arthur Shawcross, who killed at least 13 people in upstate New York.

Other tokens include prison letters, autographs, postcards, jail-cell books, goatee and pubic hair clippings, bloody handprints, a playing card signed by Henry Hill (the mobster turned informant played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas), a San Quentin death-row hot pot signed by Richard Allen Davis, who kidnapped and killed 12-year-old Polly Klaas, and an anthology of haiku poetry that Rader once had inside his Kansas prison cell.

Remember the 2003 Macaulay Culkin movie, Party Monster? It tells the story of Michael Alig, a flamboyant Manhattan party promoter who murdered and dismembered a friend and fellow drug addict in 1996, before dumping body parts in the Hudson River. Dodge’s site offers an Alig foot tracing and a signed copy of the killer’s Wikipedia page.

Each item listed on the site features an enlargeable photograph, additional images, and an information-packed column summarizing the relevant criminal’s life and dark deeds, along with a description of the item’s origin.

In the “Books” category, there’s a 1971 paperback called None Dare Call It A Conspiracy, a best seller pushing the idea of a “New World Order”—a secret society of wealthy elites trying to spread a global socialist government—that once belonged to David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, who killed six New Yorkers by handgun between the summers of 1976 and 1977.

While Shawcross’s recipe costs just $50, the Berkowitz book, which contains his handwritten marginal notes, goes for $1,666, making it one of the site’s pricier items.

The book’s webpage notes that Berkowitz’s notoriety led to New York State enacting so-called “Son of Sam” laws, which bar criminals from monetizing their fame. It adds:

“The book was owned by Berkowitz in prison. Accompanied is a handwritten letter signed by Dee Channel, Berkowitz’s infamous pen pal. Included is the original envelope the book was sent to Dee in. The envelope return address is signed, Berkowitz.”

Visiting Dodge’s store is like taking a comprehensive, intimate tour of America’s top homicides in the past 40-plus years. All the big-name killers are here, represented by at least one item, from John Wayne Gacy to O. J. Simpson (okay, accused killer), and from Aileen Wuornos (played by Charlize Theron in 2003’s Monster) to Scott Peterson, convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, in Modesto, California, in 2002.

Items linked to murderous terrorists, such as those involved in the Boston Marathon and Oklahoma City bombings, appear, too.

Terry Nichols, who conspired with Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma massacre, mailed a religious book, Things That Differ, last July, and now it can be yours for $185. It was sent from the Florence, Colorado, supermax prison where Nichols occupies “Bombers Row” alongside Olympic Park terrorist Eric Rudolph and Ted “The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Opposite the title page, Nichols neatly wrote, “I hope you find this enjoyable, informative, and enlightening. Blessings, Terry.”

Taking in the letters and books, the cookware and music CDs, we’re reminded that these killers, their crimes ghastly, their sociopathy extreme, are, or were, members of our species, no matter how much we wish they weren’t. We call them “monsters,” understandably—see the aforementioned movie titles—but Dodge’s shop, crowded with humdrum human objects, makes it harder to view these individuals as unrecognizably alien.

It’s an awareness most sharply present when looking at the photos and letters. We encounter future killers in snapshots taken by friends or family. Sarah Kolb, who strangled and dismembered a high-school classmate in 2005, is shown posing with two golden retrievers. On the photo’s flip side, Kolb wrote the dogs’ names: Kye and Abby.

John Robinson, sometimes called the “internet’s first serial killer” for making online contact with victims beginning in 1993, was convicted of three murders, admitted to five more, and might have killed others. In the “Photographs” section, we see a grinning, grade-school Boy Scout shaking hands with a fellow Scout.

Enlarge the letters and you can read them. Again, many are striking in their normalcy. If the info page didn’t detail the horrific murders, you wouldn’t guess the words were penned by a homicidal sadist. Some of the killers write clearly, even elegantly, and express normal human emotions (whether genuine or feigned).

“The holiday card you sent was cool,” writes Richard Ramirez. “How’s the new neighborhood? Made any new friends? I hope you’re feeling better.”

A typed, six-page letter from John Wayne Gacy quickly gets less “normal,” though, as he starts manipulating, lying, simmering with controlled rage, and graphically discussing sex.

A handwritten Manson letter, priced at $350, is jagged of style and thought, has a few cross-outs, and includes a swastika. But, on balance, the letters were not written in the extreme state of mind these killers presumably entered when committing their crimes.

In the “Female Killers” section, some of the convicts write bubbly, unguarded missives, using exclamation points, all caps, and even heart-dotted i’s.

 

BUT what about those face-to-face interactions Dodge has with killers, separated by safety-glass partitions? Dodge says one murderer he’s met stands out from the others.

“I’ve only been truly scared twice while visiting an inmate,” the true-crime collector reveals, “and both times it was with the same individual.”

The first encounter was in November 2017, and the setting was one of the death-row buildings at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in the boondocks of southeast Texas. Polunsky is a grim, sprawling complex of gray concrete buildings on 470 acres of unincorporated land. It’s surrounded by high-security fencing topped with razor wire, and guards surveil the 23-structure complex from a quartet of watchtowers 24-7. Dodge won’t name the inmate, one of roughly 300 at any given time in this wing of Polunsky, where the prisoners wear white jumpsuits with “DR” on the back, and live in slit-windowed cells of 60 square feet.

The eight-year veteran of the murderabilia circuit has a rule concerning discussion of killers: He’ll only go into detail about those who have died, or those he no longer communicates with. Depending on the convict, he may not even identify them by name. But he will say this about the Polunsky inmate:

“His crimes were shocking, grotesque, stomach-wrenching.”

In the movies, the most famous visit to a serial killer is when FBI Academy trainee Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, visits Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, in The Silence of the Lambs. Lecter utters his celebrated line at the end of the unnerving encounter: “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

In that scene, Starling walks down a dim corridor between barred cells. One inmate creepily stares. Another says something crude. Even before she reaches Lecter, it’s scary.

During Dodge’s Polunsky visit, he removed his shoes, went through a metal detector, and got patted down by a correctional officer, who looked at him sideways for wanting to visit this death-row inmate. He was then escorted into a visitors’ room, where he watched the clock, waiting. He had no idea what to expect from the guy. Dodge says the fear wasn’t there right away. But he felt a heaviness in his soul from the place’s grimness.

Finally, the jumpsuited inmate arrived. He began talking about his murders. Dodge had listened to killers discuss their acts before. And he’d been reading about murders for years. But this experience was different, he says. This guy got granular, and his crimes were horrific. “What made matters worse,” Dodge says, “was that the individual was not only bragging, but smiling the entire time as he relived his crimes, discussing everything in detail. I didn’t feel physically scared. The conditions in the room were safe. But I felt emotional and mental fear, listening to him. I was almost in a state of paralysis.”

This didn’t stop Dodge from visiting the inmate a second time. And once again, the man began to brag and smile as he went back over the details of his gruesome murders.

Artwork by Heir

AS Dodge points out, there are two questions people tend to ask when they learn what he does for a living. How’d you get into this? is one. The other question raises the issue of “blood money”—the ethics of making money selling items connected to these brutal crimes. Sometimes, Dodge says, people suggest what he does isn’t right.

In response, the collector counters, “I’m not hurting anybody with what I do. I don’t find it any different than what the media and Hollywood does with true-crime content, and always has. And I’m on a tiny molecule scale compared to what they do.”

It’s hard to argue Dodge’s point about the monetizing of murder. True-crime material is everywhere you look, whether on television (Dateline NBC, 48 Hours, Making A Murderer), in movies (Zodiac, My Friend Dahmer, Monster), or in books.

Consider In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s 1966 literary masterpiece about the murder of a Kansas family in 1959, and Vincent Bugliosi’s book Helter Skelter, about the Manson murders, published in 1974. These are the world’s top-selling true-crime narratives, with millions of copies printed. Both came out shortly after the crimes, with relatives of the victims still grieving. And they made a lot of money for two New York publishers, and two authors.

Tabloid newspapers like the New York Post run wild with murder stories—especially the marquee ones, such as the JonBenét Ramsey case, or that of O. J. Simpson. (Side note: Dodge’s site does have Simpson items for sale, including his Citgo Plus credit card.)

True crime has been a hot genre for a while, of course. Ann Rule’s best-selling 1980 book about Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, sold millions, and Rule followed it up with a number of other best sellers, while spawning dozens of imitators. These days, however, story-delivery venues have multiplied, from Netflix to podcasts, and they’re monetizing more true-crime material than ever. Serial, S-Town, and My Favorite Murder are three of the top podcasts in the last few years, and all three work the true-crime genre.

Murder sells. Serial killers can acquire a name-recognition factor rivaling celebrities in sports and movies. In terms of monetizing homicides, where do you draw the line? Does Dodge cross it?

His website’s tone is sober. It’s a well-designed site, but it’s not slick, or sensationalistic. It doesn’t come off as romanticizing or elevating these sociopaths. And it’s not like Dodge is getting rich off his enterprise. He says his platform receives up to 150,000 unique views weekly, but the attention doesn’t convert to huge sales, with most of the visitors just browsing.

“I’m not one who glamorizes what they do,” Dodge says simply. “These killers are grotesque, they are unforgivable. I find comfort in knowing they are locked up. But I am also aware there are others like them on the loose, which is terrifying. Law enforcement believes at any given time there are 25 to 50 active American serial killers.”

Dodge uses terms like “artifacts,” “preservation,” and “dark history” when discussing his site. While other people might get nerdy about vinyl records, Civil War battles, wine vintages, or the etymology of words, Dodge is driven to collect and catalog material shadowed by homicide, soaked with blood. He wants to get close to these objects—close enough to touch.

“I enjoy the dark history part of it,” he says. “Murder will always happen, violent death will always be around us, and I choose to embrace and understand death, rather than fear every single thing around the corner. I believe in preserving this dark material, for historical purposes, and for the fascination, the curiosity, we have about these crimes.”

Andrew Dodge

ANDREW Dodge was 11 when his own fascination began. That was when he learned about the Milwaukee chocolate-factory worker turned cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer.

People have asked Dodge if there was some horror in his own childhood that might account for the way he gravitates toward darkness, but he says his childhood was normal, though he did, like a lot of kids, weather a parental divorce. And like a lot of teenagers, he acted out in high school, and eventually dropped out. He ended up getting his GED, and later received a two-year degree in Human Services.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s story kindled an early interest in murderers, but it wasn’t until 2010, at age 19, that Dodge first wrote a letter to a jailed serial killer, Phillip Jablonski, with whom he still corresponds.

Between 1978 and 1991, Jablonski killed five women, with four of the murders coming after he was paroled following 12 years in prison for the 1978 murder of his girlfriend. During his first incarceration, a woman responded to Jablonski’s newspaper ad and they ended up getting married. This woman was one of those he killed in 1991 during a five-day murder spree. His actions included stabbing, strangling, raping, mutilating, and shooting. Behind bars at San Quentin, Jablonski is currently one of 2,600-plus prisoners on death row nationwide.

During the period when Dodge first contacted Jablonski (a convict known, in fact, for his prison letter-writing), he had been watching a lot of movies, documentaries, and TV shows about serial murderers, and decided to reach out to one. The impetus, he explains, was to gain a little understanding, if possible, into what makes these killers tick.

This quest to illuminate, in any way, behavior unfathomable to most of us continues to fuel Dodge’s collecting and outreach efforts. He is especially struck by the way psychopaths can commit the most obscene homicides and then, in some cases, come home to a wife and kids and eat a sandwich. He says holding a letter written by Ted Bundy or Aileen Wuornos gives a chilly thrill. But to him, it also feels like this spooky intimacy delivers a small insight into the killers. Most important of all, Dodge says, possessing these objects—taking murder tokens in hand—gives him an experience of getting close to evil, without risk to his safety. Nobody wants a serial killer at their front door. His business brings him close to his enduring fascination, without the dangerous consequences.

 

SO how does he go about contacting killers?

“I usually do a little bit of research first,” Dodge says. That includes going into Department of Corrections databases and digging up basic inmate information. Sometimes he’ll call a prison to track down a detail. Then he writes a letter of introduction. He asks how the inmate is doing, and says a few things about his hobbies and “real-life stuff like food, politics, news, TV.” Sometimes an inmate contacts him first, rather than the other way around.

“A lot of them just want somebody who isn’t on the inside to talk to,” he says.

Dodge has now corresponded with more than 250 inmates. He’s traveled to multiple penitentiaries for visits, and has sat down with four death-row prisoners and counting. Among the killers he has visited is David Conley, who massacred eight people in August, 2015, in Houston, six of them children, one of the kids his own 13-year-old son.

Serial killers David Berkowitz, Wayne Williams, and Derrick Todd Lee; Mikhail Markhasev (killer of Bill Cosby’s only son, Ennis); Manson family member Bruce Davis; and Boston mob boss and FBI informant Whitey Bulger, murdered after a prison transfer this past October—Dodge has corresponded with them all. He and Bulger were in contact for some time, and Dodge even has a museum-type display in his home exhibiting Bulger documents and a portrait painting by Tennessee artist Adam Crutchfield. Dodge prizes a Bulger letter complaining about how Johnny Depp made $20 million playing him in Black Mass. The document also reveals that Depp repeatedly asked to visit Bulger, but the mobster said no.

Charles Manson, who died in 2017, only wrote Dodge once, sending a postcard covered in incoherent rambling. Dodge says Richard Ramirez, who died in 2013, had a colorless communication style—somewhat surprising considering this was a guy who, during his first court appearance in 1988, held up a pentagram-inscribed hand and yelled, “Hail, Satan!”

“In our exchanges, he was a very boring man,” Dodge says, adding, “Most of his letters, he would be like, ‘What is your favorite color?’ Or band. Or food. A lot of normalized questions and bland statements.”

Ramirez did get weirder in letters to women, however. “I’ve seen some of this correspondence,” Dodge continues. “Ramirez would ask women for foot photos. If they had children, he would ask about their cup size or what their vagina was shaped like.”

Then, there was the time Ramirez called Dodge and they had their only conversation. “On the phone,” the true-crime collector says, “he sounded robotic.”

 

WHEN Dodge first began acquiring these relics, he coveted a painting by John Wayne Gacy, who was executed by lethal injection in 1994. Now, Dodge owns two Gacys, one of them depicting “Pogo the Clown.” Pogo—as any true-crime fan knows—was the name of the clown character Gacy played while performing at children’s birthday parties in seventies-era Chicago. Sometimes Gacy did his killing while dressed in this costume.

Dodge also owns art created by Cary Stayner, who murdered four women near Yosemite Park during a few months in 1999. “The Yosemite Killer,” as he was known, remains on death row at San Quentin. Dodge purchased the art from one of Stayner’s former pen pals. He bought the Gacy works from the killer’s former art dealer. Dodge hangs the art of both men on his walls—favorite items in his personal collection.

Not every killer responds to his overtures. The six-foot-nine serial murderer and necrophile Edmund Kemper, who killed ten people between 1964 and 1973, including hitchhiking college women, has ignored Dodge’s letters. Dodge knows of only two people who have received responses from Kemper, a man who once scored a 145 on an IQ test given at an asylum for the criminally insane. Similarly, Anthony Sowell, aka the Cleveland Strangler, won’t correspond, though he did send Dodge two pieces of his art, which got this killer of 11 women in trouble at the Ohio prison where he sits on death row.

Other convicts won’t stop asking for stuff.

“Some prisoners can be divas and have ridiculous demands,” Dodge says. “Dennis Rader is very manipulative. He wants you to number the pages of your letters, format everything correctly, and he’ll correct your paragraph structure, your spelling, etc.” Speaking of Rader, who once served as a compliance officer in his Wichita, Kansas, suburb, fining people for minor infractions like overgrown lawns, Dodge adds, “He’s been by far the biggest pest and annoyance of anyone.”

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who gunned down nine African-Americans worshipping at a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015, did respond to Dodge, who wrote him a letter on the day Roof got arrested. But when Dodge posted Roof’s letter, priced at $1,000, multiple media sources ran with the story, and the killer went silent.

“Roof was the first inmate to blow up on my website,” Dodge says.

The New York Daily News contacted Dodge for a comment. “It’s just an extreme hobby, more than anything,” he told the paper. “Everybody’s fascinated with true crime to an extent, but I take it a step further. Some people get it, some people don’t.”

The Roof letter, bought by a foreign collector, is written in a calm, polite style, and seems normal, except for a moment halfway through when the racist killer expresses a concern: “I also want to ask you the origin of your last name. Is Dodge an English surname? Or is it anglicized (?) name of a different origin?”

 

DODGE’s true-crime operation began as a hobby: He bought a murder-linked item, and then bought another. Before long, he realized he could parlay his passion into a business, as there seemed to be enough of a subculture to justify an online store, and plenty of murders to keep fueling his enterprise.

These days, Dodge says a pretty diverse crowd visits his site, from strange fans obsessed with certain serial killers to academics, retired cops, and museum curators. He says law enforcement surveils his site periodically, perhaps working on cold cases, studying killers, or looking to see if any “Son of Sam” laws are being broken.

Though convicts themselves can’t profit by monetizing their notoriety, it’s not illegal for friends or relatives of a killer to sell an item. Nor is it illegal for Dodge to receive a letter written by an A-list killer and hawk it for a large sum. Over the years, legislators have proposed shutting down the murderabilia trade altogether, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The value of a true-crime collectible depends on the killer’s profile, high or low, as well as rarity. And when it comes to letters, handwritten documents are worth more than typed ones, naturally, and signatures, as opposed to initials, bump up the price.

“The most expensive murderabilia item to date that I can think of was Bonnie Parker’s personal Colt .38 snub-nosed revolver,” Dodge says. “That sold for $264,000. My most valuable item is Aileen Wuornos’s robe, which I have priced at $8,500.”

Dodge bought the robe from Dawn Botkins, Wuornos’s childhood best friend, and a woman Wuornos wrote to for ten years while on death row—correspondence later compiled into a kind of Wuornos autobiography called Dear Dawn, published in 2012.

“Botkins received all of Wuornos’s property and even her ashes after she was executed in Florida in 2002,” Dodge explains. “The robe came with two certificates of authenticity. Wuornos wore it every day until her execution.”

During Dodge’s years of corresponding with convicts, and running his shop, he has learned to obey some basic safety protocols. He uses a PO box, for example, and advises anyone writing inmates to do so. He puts the matter directly: “You are always at risk of an inmate knowing someone on the outside and finding you, worst-case scenario.”

He says he’s been harassed online—by a killer’s girlfriend, or by supporters of a killer—for selling an item connected to an inmate he no longer communicates with.

“It’s crazy,” Dodge says. “Especially when the killer is just manipulating the girl. I’ve had problems with groupies for Dylann Roof, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and Sarah Jo Pender.”

The Menendez brothers killed their parents in Beverly Hills in 1989. Pender was convicted, along with her boyfriend, of murdering two roommates in Indiana in 2000.

Despite so much contact with psychopaths, Dodge says he’s only had a few uncomfortable experiences. In 2013, a Mexican cartel hitman, José Martínez, sent Dodge a stick-figure drawing meant to represent the collector in a noose. Along with the image, the assassin wrote, “This is one of the ways I killed people.”

The threat stemmed from Martínez suspecting Dodge of being a cop after he asked questions related to Martínez’s former and current trials. Dodge says he was just interested in how the mind of a cold-blooded hitman worked. He was also threatened by Jeremy Jones, aka the Crystal Meth Killer, a man investigators described as a “redneck Ted Bundy” for his Alabama charm and good looks. There was a miscommunication between Jones and Dodge concerning a Bible the serial killer had sent him.

Dodge’s journey into this netherworld of people locked up for acting on homicidal urges has resulted in a change of viewpoint on the death penalty.

“Before stepping into a death-row visiting room, I was pro-death penalty,” he says. “Now I am against it 100 percent. What these killers have done is horrible and they must pay for their actions, but I don’t view these people as monsters. They are just very disturbed individuals, with different underlying factors, issues, and their own demons, which got them into their predicament in the first place.”

Dodge refers to the killers he gets to know as “walking, talking dark history books.” However, his relationship with Dustin Lynch, who at age 15, in 2002, murdered a 17-year-old Ohio girl, might stand apart from the rest. Dodge calls it a kind of friendship.

Lynch—serving 20 years to life—was back in the news in 2013 when he strangled his cellmate, a convicted pedophile. Lynch carved “CHOMO” into the man’s back with a razor, which prison officials believe stood for “child molester.”

To say, then, that Dodge has a tolerance for darkness is putting it mildly.

Consider, also, the fact that his art collection contains works by a Washington State killer nicknamed “The Werewolf Butcher” for his horrific murders in the mid-nineties involving a mother and two children, sexual mutilation, and the displaying of bodies. The man’s name is Jack Spillman, and he’s serving a life sentence in Dodge’s home state.

“The few pieces of Spillman art I have are some of my favorites,” Dodge says in a conversational tone. “It’s very meticulous work. Spillman spends months on just one piece of art at a time, perfecting it until the piece is complete.”

 

FOR visitors to Dodge’s website, the exposure to so much darkness can be deeply unsettling. At the same time, it shines light on an issue that has always confronted human beings: What do we do with society’s most deviant, violent, destructive individuals? People with psyches so warped they can kill and then go eat a meal. We don’t want to think about these individuals, and we try our best not to. We wish they didn’t exist. But they do.

Dodge’s website makes this realization unignorable. Moreover, it offers a potent window on prison life—a life, a fate, for more than two million of our fellow citizens on any given day.

Some of the items in Dodge’s store might not seem very exciting. A killer’s prison library card. An L.A. serial killer’s purchase order for a new pair of Nikes. An inmate’s visitor application form. But the very banality of these items drives home the grim reality of what it’s like to be on the inside, in the belly of the beast.

There’s an “Inmate Appeal Form” from San Quentin, listing names of numerous death-row inmates, including Scott Peterson, requesting a television upgrade.

There’s a detailed, handwritten letter from a killer describing in precise language how he crafted a “fishing line,” using threads pulled from bedclothes and a flattened toothpaste tube that he then tossed outside his cell. An inmate in a nearby cell, sometimes even on a lower level, does his own “fishing.” If the slender lines with their weighted ends entangle in just the right way, the connected inmates have a way to pass small items.

Stuff like this takes you inside prison life more convincingly than any TV show.

 

AS for Dodge, he recently launched a podcast on his website. He’s already interviewed Rick Staton, a murderabilia pioneer and Gacy’s former art dealer, and John Borowski, maker of documentaries on historical serial killers, including Chicago’s H. H. Holmes (to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a forthcoming Martin Scorcese film based on the book, The Devil in the White City). Other episodes have featured Mafia historian and true-crime author Christian Cipollini, and former Mississippi death-row inmate Michelle Byrom, released from prison in 2016 after spending 16 years locked up.

For future podcasts, Dodge has plans to interview high-profile murderers around the country. People will listen. Our appetite for darkness is not going away any time soon.

Artwork by Heir

Art by Alex Heir. Photo of Andrew Dodge courtesy of Dodge.

SiriusXM Host Rude Jude Angelini

Posted on by Team Penthouse

To truly understand Sirius XM’s “Rude Jude” Angelini, one must tune in to his All Out Show on Shade 45, Eminem’s hip-hop music channel. From porn stars sampling sex toys, to Angelini’s producer taking a kick to the nuts by a dominatrix, every weekday from 4 to 7 P.M. Eastern is a new bounty of the convoluted essence that is being human.

The 41-year-old Angelini, who hails from the rust-belt town of Pontiac, Michigan, is an advocate for free thought and a regular offender of safe spaces, saying and posting exactly what he feels without batting an eye.

For this interview, we met at Angelini’s L.A. apartment, where we sat surrounded by hundreds of classic records, from Dean Martin to Steely Dan, and talked.

What do you think of our hypersensitive culture now? 

I’ve been doing radio for 14 years. What we used to do we’d never be able to do now—it’s too racy. The millennials that were 10 are now 24, and they have Twitter accounts. But the thing is, most people aren’t bitches. They’re centrists when it comes to these things. But they don’t jump on Twitter and say, “I agree!” We allow a small, loud minority to dictate what we can and cannot say, and it’s affected me in a negative way. It’s kept me from getting jobs. And there’s certain jokes I don’t crack anymore because it’s not worth the headache.

Censorship today seems so toxic to creativity. Like, I’m offended so I want you to stop creating. 

I’ve never seen more close-minded people. This younger generation thinks that if you don’t agree with them, it’s a personal attack. It’s not. I’ve got family members that won’t speak to me because they don’t like the way I talk, because I say whatever I want.

Tell me about Hyena and Hummingbird, your short story collections about sex, drugs, and growing up poor in Middle America. 

I knew how I was viewed—I didn’t go to college, I grew up poor. I was looked at as a “wigger.” I was a shock jock on a hip-hop station. So I decided I’d write a book and then it snowballed. I realized that most people that bought my book hadn’t bought a book in years. So I wanted to encourage people to read and to write their story.

My stories harken back to the writers of the 1970s that didn’t go to college but had something to say. I wanted to be the voice of the voiceless and I wanted people who might not write a book to have something to relate to. This is the flyover states. This is the shit town. This is Bakersfield. This is Pontiac. This is Cleveland.

How did you get into radio?

I was living in Michigan, working as a window cleaner. I saved my money doing shit jobs and moved out to L.A. to act. On The Jenny Jones Show, I was the insult comic. Everything that made me good at that show made me bad at auditioning.

The only job I ever got was for the role of a robber. I had just gotten back from Detroit where I had been robbed, so I said everything the robber said and I got the job.

We hear you have a penchant for fine-ass spectacles. 

I didn’t know I needed glasses until I read the teleprompter for the Jenny Jones people. I kept squinting. They were like, “Do you know how to read?” They thought I was illiterate. Turns out I had astigmatism. I wear expensive glasses as a way to signal to people that I have money. Isn’t that what we all do, sending subtle signals to those of the opposite sex that we’re worth mating with?

You’re a fan of Penthouse Forum. Did it help you learn about the ladies? 

Once when I was jerking off to Forum, I busted off to one where the dude had to give up his wife after losing a poker match. I [learned that] I like degradation. I had this downstairs neighbor and he was on welfare. He had all the 1970s Penthouses—that’s why I like hairy pussies. He never left the house except to get groceries once a week and always left the door unlocked. I would sneak down and take his porn and jerk off.

What’s your favorite drug?

Depends. I love to fuck on mushrooms. Ketamine is my favorite to do by myself. I listen to music and hallucinate. But I can’t do everything I like anymore because I broke my body.

Is it true you had trouble getting Hummingbird noticed by reviewers?

Instead of reviewers saying, “This is trash,” they just ignored it. I’d rather them be upset, at least I’d get some attention. That #MeToo shit, no literary people would review it. Finally, there was a woman who’s a reviewer, but I had to sleep with her.

Power of the D?

Yeah. I had to trade some dick to get into the website and then I had to fuck her again to get her to post it on the website. Yo, I’m a grown-up. I understand what I’m getting into. I actually have a disdain for people that fuck for parts and then go back 20 years later and complain about it. You knew what the fuck you were doing. We’re grown-ups.

Jude Angelini at Home — Not Being Rude at All

Interview by Camille Todaro. Photo by Audrey Ma.

Mac DeMarco: Hungover with the Prince of Indie Pop

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Mac DeMarco is hungover this sunny August afternoon. But it is the first time in a long, long time. When he invited Penthouse into his home, the critically acclaimed indie-pop star had just wrapped up a summer tour with four sold-out shows in Los Angeles.

“There is a special kind of pressure with the hometown show with all the friends there,” DeMarco sheepishly admits while he brushes his teeth. “Even though it wasn’t a big venue, I got nervous. The first show kind of went sideways. I vomited onstage, I pissed my pants, and I burned some cigarettes on my chest and my tongue. I’ve never done that before.”

To anyone who has followed DeMarco’s career from the beginning, this kind of show is par for the course. Back in the day, when he was infamous but not yet famous, he was known for summoning the spirit of one-man freak show G. G. Allin, once even allegedly swinging from the ceiling with a drumstick up his ass.

Now, domesticity has struck the 28-year-old musician, who just bought a house in L.A., a total fixer-upper that was inhabited by an eccentric gay couple who left an epic collection of porn in the dilapidated basement. Contractors got to work on the house right away, transforming the mess into the adorable white and blue bungalow we’re sitting in today. “We painted it like a Greek restaurant,” he says as he shows us around. “Too bad I’m not a Greek guy.”

After almost a decade of top-selling albums, wild, sweaty shows, and headlining huge festivals such as the Pitchfork Music Festival, Coachella, Fuji Rock in Japan, and performing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, ABC’s Charlie Rose, and at Radio City Music Hall, he’s taking a quick breather, settling into life with his girlfriend and their new home. Even more recently, DeMarco departed from his long-time label, Captured Tracks, to start his own enterprise, Mac’s Record Label. His first release Here Comes The Cowboy drops today.

Though he seems like an eccentric goofball in person, DeMarco’s music is a radical combination of Morrissey’s emotive melodies with the quirky comedy of Jonathan Richman and a pinch of yacht rock. On his earlier albums, he wrote catchy romantic songs about the things he loves, like his long-term girlfriend, blue jeans, and Viceroy cigarettes. But in recent years, he’s explored deeper emotional territory, even penning an entire album about growing up poor in rural Canada with his (now estranged) drug-addled father and struggling single mother. His fans are obsessive and look to the hoser like he’s a god. And he kind of is. After all, no one plays guitar like DeMarco. He championed a new genre of indie rock for millennials.

Only eight years ago, DeMarco was sleeping next to a water heater in the closet of a punk house in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now he can sell out the Hollywood Palladium in five minutes and has more money in the bank than he ever dreamed of. But that doesn’t mean DeMarco is spending recklessly. In fact, he still drives an old Volvo and wears his undies until they disintegrate.

That’s showbiz, baby.

Photography by Gerald Acuna

Comedian Ester Steinberg is our Muse

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Without a personal Muse, life can be pretty boring. Without a Penthouse Muse, life is just sad.

Hollywood’s new “It Girl,” comedian and actress Ester Steinberg, may be a J-Date user’s wet dream, but she’s even more spectacular when you get her in front of the camera. Her new comedy album, Hebrew School Dropout, is available now and (spoiler alert) it’s totally hilarious.

We could say that no muse is bad muse, but that would be completely inappropriate, so we will not.

Interview: Georges St-Pierre

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Georges St-Pierre is known as the G.O.A.T.

For those unfamiliar with this bit of sports parlance, it stands for the “Greatest of All Time.”

It’s a huge claim to make about a fighter, and St-Pierre (also called “GSP” or “Rush”) isn’t the kind of guy who would make it. There’s no Conor McGregor-esque showboating with GSP. He has no need to lord his incredible record over you: the 2,204 consecutive days defending his title; the plethora of fighting publications ranking him as the greatest welterweight fighter of all time; the rare ability to not only fight across divisions but to be the best. He’s earned the right to call himself a bad motherfucker, but during our interview, he was genial, polite, even friendly. Maybe it was because GSP, now 38, was older than most champs. Or maybe it was his Kyokushin karate training, a martial arts discipline that emphasizes humility and self-control. Or perhaps years of cage fighting in the UFC taught him that, when you get down to brass tacks, hubris gets you nowhere.

In November 2017, the Québec native returned to the octagon after a four-year hiatus, moving up a weight class and choking out Michael Bisping to claim the middleweight title. The fight, held at Madison Square Garden, was Canada’s most-watched pay-per-view event ever, and had UFC commentators saying it looked like GSP had only been gone four months, instead of years. His decision to leave fighting in 2013 was made partly because he needed a break, psychologically, from the sport he loved, and partly due to dissatisfaction with the ways the UFC was dealing with drug cheats. During his time off, St-Pierre indulged his other passion, paleontology. Yes, the guy famous for beating grown men to a bloody pulp in fight after championship fight is a huge dinosaur nerd.

It’s this multifaceted nature—his fierce combativeness in the ring, his geniality in person, his enduring dedication to such a physical sport, and his geeky love of paleontology—that made him so intriguing an elite figure in the UFC. Was St-Pierre the greatest fighter of all time? It’s a matter for debate. But without a doubt, GSP was one of the most interesting.

We sat down with St-Pierre to talk about what motivates him, what secrets he discovered that kept him on top for so long, why he retired for the first time in 2013, and which beautiful woman, attending one of his fights, briefly made him lose his focus.

What was behind your decision to walk away from the UFC in 2013?  

I had a lot of personal issues. The pressure of always being in the spotlight and being criticized—it really got to my head to the point it was driving me a little bit crazy. I was developing anxiety and so, for my own health—for my mental health—I needed to leave. Also, I had problems with the UFC and their drug-testing policy. I knew a lot of people were cheating. It had been bothering me for a long time. I was carrying this with me for a long time, fighting and trying to perform and it was starting to affect my performance.

What inspired you to get back in the ring?

When I left, I never said I was retired, because I thought I wanted to come back if changes were made. Now, with the USADA [U.S. Anti-Doping Agency], the sport is cleaner. Also, I wanted to come back to do something special, to do something unique. Something that would be different from what I was doing in the past.

Fighting for the middleweight title interested me. I always received a lot of criticism from the fans. They said I didn’t finish fights, that I fought surgically, that I didn’t take enough risks and never went up a weight class. So, I wanted to shut up these three criticisms in one fight and that’s why I came back. I was very hungry for that fight. I came back and it was a good night for me.

You were only the fourth fighter in UFC history to be a multidivision champion. I get the idea you don’t like to be told you can’t do something.

If someone says you can’t do something, that’s when you need to do it. It’s a rare achievement, so that’s why I wanted to do it. I did it for myself. A lot of people do it for other people, but I wanted to do it for myself, for my own legacy, to be able to know that I did it.

Being a champ and having a belt—what does that mean to you?

The belt, the name…it’s more of a symbol. To be honest with you, the more experienced I became, I realized there is no strongest man in the world. This doesn’t exist. When you have a belt, most people, for them, it means, “Oh, I’m the most bad-ass man in the world.” It’s not true. Maybe the baddest man in the world is sitting on his couch eating popcorn, you know what I mean? You’d never know. The more experienced you are, you realize what it means. Winning a belt just means on that night, at that particular moment, you beat that guy. You were better than that guy. It doesn’t mean you’re better than all the other guys. Or it doesn’t mean that the guy you beat that day won’t beat you another day.

So a lot of things changed as I matured. When you’re young, you want to be known as the “baddest man,” and when you get older, you realize [they’re] just symbols. I wanted to do it for myself and to have the belt. It was a great achievement, but for me it doesn’t mean the same thing that it means for a lot of the people.

What do you say to those who argue MMA is too violent?

It’s very dangerous. When people say, “It’s a barbaric sport, I don’t like it, I don’t want to watch it,” they’re right that it’s a barbaric sport. Like boxing is a barbaric sport. Like American football is a barbaric sport. Rugby is a barbaric sport. But you know what, I love it. I did it and I grew up on it. It’s just a different form of entertainment and people have different tastes for different things.

I think everybody secretly loves it. I had a girlfriend that said she hated it, but every time the fight started she’d be glued to the screen.

Dana White once said something I thought was very clever. Say you’re at a football match or a rugby match, in the seats, watching the match, and a fight breaks out in the crowd. Everybody will stop watching the match and start watching the fight in the crowd.

Because it’s part of our nature. It’s part of who we are. I can put anybody in a situation where he will have to fight. It can be my mom, who is the nicest human being, but I can put her in a situation that she would have to fight to defend herself or defend the people that she loves. Everybody can relate to that, that’s why it is so popular.

You were talking about the psychological pressures of fighting. How do you deal with that aspect of the sport?

That’s a very important aspect to fighting, and it applies to every sphere of life—sport, business, when you ask a girl on a date. It could be anything. In my sport, there are skills and there is confidence. Some people have the skills, but they don’t have the confidence. It’s like having money in the bank without spending it.

Other athletes have the confidence but don’t have the skills. It’s like a dream that can never be achieved. That’s what my trainer, John Danaher, would say to me and it was very, very smart: “The key is to have the skills and the confidence.” That’s what makes a good athlete. You need both. For example, Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan started acting like a champion before he became a champion. LeBron James, same thing. Tiger Woods in golf, same thing. Every actor—Arnold Schwarzenegger—same thing. They have that kind of confidence. Confidence is sort of a mental game. Confidence is a choice you can work on.

I wasn’t always that confident before a fight, but I could work on it. I had tricks I used to make myself confident, so when I went into the fight, I could pretend that I was confident, even if I wasn’t. I became confident using these tricks. And confidence is very important for a fighter, important for a businessman, important for everything you do in life. Because when you do something, you need to have trust that when you do it, you can do it 100 percent, no reservations, and confidence is a big part of that.

Who do you view as the top fighters in those middle divisions?

MMA is a sport in constant evolution. Someone could be good today and in six months, there’s going to be another guy who’s going to come out of nowhere, do something incredible, and he will be the guy to beat. He will be hyped up as the best-ever, so we never know. Right now, I like Khabib [Nurmagomedov]. He’s incredible. He’s an amazing fighter. But I’ll also go back to something I said earlier. It’s not necessarily the best fighter who wins a fight. It’s the fighter who fights best the night of the fight.

You’ve been called “The Greatest of All Time” and you’ve spoken about your true loves and what excites you—women, dinosaurs, and fighting. So I’ve got three final questions. First, who’s the greatest woman of all time?

Greatest woman of all time? My God, that’s a hard question. I’ll mention one very beautiful woman, Cindy Crawford. I remember she came to one of my fights and I saw her in the crowd and lost focus for a second. I think she’s amazing.

Obviously, now we need to know the greatest dinosaur of all time.

For me, it’s the Tyrannosaurus. T. rexes had the best olfactory senses of all the dinosaurs. That means a blind T. rex could still find you. The T. rex didn’t need his eyes to hunt. That’s something people don’t know. The T. rex was an amazing creature.

Sounds terrifying. Last one: Who’s the greatest fighter of all time?

That’s hard to say. Like I said, it doesn’t exist. We can just pile up the achievements of the athlete. And the sport constantly evolves. The fighters of today are better than the fighters of yesterday, and it goes on like this. Someone can be good today, but in ten years there are going to be guys that are better. That’s what I believe—that records are meant to be broken.

Pop Star Emily Vaughn is Our Crush

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Pop star Emily Vaughn has a love/hate relationship with social media.

The 24-year-old Florida native was recently in Hawaii trying to unplug from a busy life in Los Angeles when she looked at her phone and instantly regretted it.

Checking social media, she came across a post that brought all her anxieties to the surface. Another up-and-coming pop star had released a single with the same title as one of Vaughn’s songs. Its cachet was lost.

“I do struggle with depression and anxiety, and being on social media can make it even more difficult,” the singer admits. “There’s always something to compare yourself to. My generation are the guinea pigs of how this tool will affect our mental health.”

Like most in Gen Z would, Vaughn took to Instagram to write about her feelings. She tapped out a long message about anxiety, depression, and mental health. She posted it, closed her phone, and felt relief.

“It’s ironic I’m bitching about social media,” Vaughn says, “because I owe my whole career to the internet.”

She grew up on Merritt Island, near Cape Canaveral, with a musical mother who also taught visual art. Vaughn and her sister played piano and guitar, and sang, often performing in school musicals and choir.

“Coming from a town of 30,000 people, I never imagined I could actually be a pop singer,” Vaughn says. “No one in my town was doing things like that.”

She was writing songs, though, sitting on her bedroom floor with her guitar or perched at the piano, her voice memo app on. Soon, she started putting the music online, hoping to catch the attention of some industry insider. Eventually, she was discovered by a music manager who flew her out to L.A. for a meet and greet. It went well (obviously), and Vaughn moved west in 2017.

Her singles have popped online, gathering a whopping three million-plus listens on Spotify. She’s been praised by Nylon, Interview, and V magazine for her infectious, daring hooks and lyrics that mix emotion with tongue-in-cheek humor that come off sweet as honey.

Her debut EP, Bitch Bops, dropped in April, and soon she’ll be hitting the road for her first American tour. For now, though, she’s thriving off the loving fans who slide into her DMs and let her know that her music has brightened what had been a shitty day.

“I have a spin to my music that is vulnerable yet cocky,” she says. “I want people to listen to my music and feel as confident and excited as I did while writing it. When fans reach out to me and say that my music makes them feel like that, I’m so happy.”

Emily Vaughn Promotional Photograph

Emily Vaughn

Photography by Justin Gilbert

Actress Jamie Lee Refused

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2019 is shaping up to be an exciting year for actress/writer/comedian Jamie Lee. Season three of the Pete Holmes/Judd Apatow HBO series Crashing premiered in January, starring Lee as Ali Reissen, a sassy New York City stand-up. She’s also appearing in another HBO comedy hit, 2 Dope Queens. We caught up with the 35-year-old comedian by phone to discuss her evolving role on Crashing, her hometown of Dallas, and why she refused to be a goat on her wedding day.

Your 2017 debut comedy album, I Mean…, features hilarious riffs on hookups, tying the knot, and rough sex. Does stand-up still give you a safe space to navigate the dark corners of your brain? 

Without comedy I might not have an outlet for exploring my dark side, and I feel very grateful to be able to do it. I mean, other types of writing and performing are really satisfying, but stand-up is kind of a catchall that lets you write and perform and sort of say whatever you want. And connect with people over ideas that maybe they’ve thought, but didn’t have the confidence to articulate.

The flaws that I see within myself, when I put them through the filter of comedy, I only appreciate more. I start to view them not as flaws, but as things that define me. What’s important about stand-up is that it takes the things you might deem bad or complicated and makes them kind of hilarious and beautiful.

In season three, episode four, of Crashing, you take on the obnoxious and overrated comedian/club owner Jason (Dov Davidoff). Was there catharsis in that?

My character, Ali, is dealing with this headliner who says whatever he wants, and thinks that makes him edgy and important. Ali proceeds to stand it up as a lot of totally off fluff. It was really thrilling to be able to portray a comedian who was taking a stand, and standing up to him.

One of the things I like about Ali is that she’s subverting people’s stale notions of female comics.

It’s really important to have this depiction of a girl stand-up on TV right now. We’re obviously living in a pretty complicated climate where a lot of people are putting close eyes on these issues of sexism and sexual harassment and being “woke.” Episode four does a really good job of tackling all of those things, and in a pretty realistic way.

I think my favorite moment would be the parking-lot scene at the end. Jason was provoked to come at me. Ali probably wouldn’t give him the time of day otherwise, but because he was attacking her directly, she really let him have it.

You’ve said that episode six, which you wrote yourself, is your favorite.

Yes. The episode is very relatable to me in my own life because when you do a stand-up set on a late-night TV show for the first time, you have a lot of friends who want to make a party out of it.

As a comedian, there’s part of you that’s really proud of yourself. But there’s also a part of you that has a lot of shame and you have a kind of fraud syndrome, and you feel a little embarrassed because there’s so much attention on you.

What’s your advice to emerging female comedians?

The advice I wish I could have given myself is to try and tune out the noise as much as possible. Try to focus on yourself and remind yourself that you are just as worthy of this pursuit as anyone else. All of that sort of positive self-talk is really helpful, because it’s a really formative time in your life, and in your comedy life. Be a kind voice in your head because, at the end of the day, only you can motivate yourself to keep going.

What do you do for balance?

I recently got into working out pretty intensely. I was not an athletic kid at all. I did not play sports. I could barely run without getting winded. And then, within the last two years, I got a personal trainer and she really kicked my ass. I leave there being like, Oh, I guess I am capable of moving my body.

You live in L.A. now. Do you miss your home state of Texas?

I do. When I was a teenager in Dallas, I thought it was a little boring, but there’s this area of Dallas called Deep Ellum, which has a lot of really cool music venues. Now every time I go back, there’s a new cool neighborhood to discover. In parts of Dallas where there was no population, [there are all these] really cool bars and restaurants. So yeah, it’s really changed a lot since I’ve lived there. Now when I go back I’m like, Ooh, it could be fun to live here. I wish that L.A. would up and move to Dallas.

Any imminent projects you can tell us about?

I just closed a development deal with [the channel] Freeform for a show called The Girlfriend. I wrote the show on my own and it would be for me to star in. It’s about a girl who finds out she might be dating a murderer. It’s sort of a female Breaking Bad. I also wrote a book about planning a wedding and modern-day wedding culture [called Weddiculous], and we’re working on turning it into a TV series.

It’s cool that marriage is increasingly egalitarian and inclusive. Your zinger “[My father] is not giving me away, because I’m not a fucking goat” makes me laugh. 

For my wedding, there were definitely some traditions we adhered to and then others that we were like, “That’s just not for us,” which I think is what everybody should do. We didn’t do the father-daughter giveaway. I think that we’re in a space right now where everyone wants to be talking about it more openly and honestly, and challenging some of these things that we were force-fed to be true. And they’re just not.

As this is Penthouse, what does being sex-positive mean to you?

Sex-positive means to each his own, not judgmental of one person’s sexuality or sexual dispositions. I feel like I fall into that category. I think the more open we are about sex and sexuality, the less alone we all feel.

Image courtesy of Sechel PR.

Peter Lloyd

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Stand By Your Manhood was dubbed “The Bro Bible” by the press, and men everywhere were pumped on Lloyd’s dry wit. But unlike Jordan Peterson’s best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, Lloyd poses funny hypotheticals, like the politics of penis size or if watching pornography makes you a misogynist. He also addresses more serious topics like rising suicide rates and how the school system is failing young men. Lloyd was ridiculed by female talk-show hosts while on his press tour, but he laughed along with the jokes and reminded them that almost all the professional references in his book were from women, and that his editor was also female. We asked Lloyd for his two cents on all the so-called man-bashing that’s taking place today.

Why write Stand By Your Manhood?

I wanted something that countered that toxic narrative and gave men the affirmations they deserved, while also being funny. Bizarrely, these feminists often hate women, too–especially the sort who appear in Penthouse. So while the book gives blokes their balls back, it also serves women, too.

Is there a feminism you could get behind and, if so, what does it look like?

Oh yeah, but it would be a feminism that didn’t require reference or a name. It would just be women living fully-realized, self-determined lives alongside men, and thinking nothing of it. I don’t want women to be indebted or answerable to the sisterhood in any way, shape, or form. I don’t want them to be bogged-down or distracted by the politics of the past. They’re better than that. Personally, I love women like Camille Paglia, Ronda Rousey, Christina Hoff Sommers, Pamela Anderson, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali–they’re all very different women, but they all embody these qualities. They’re free-thinking, free-living people who are also fucking fabulous. They just happen to be women.

So many books have been written for women on this subject. Why has your version for men caused so much controversy?

Publishing is a very political, female-dominated industry and its output is tightly controlled, so I guess they think my manuscript slipped through the net, and it drives them nuts! To me, that’s deliciously funny. Not least because, years ago, women with a voice were seen as dangerous. Now it’s men like me–but I love that. It means the book is countercultural. It’s a little bit punk rock, which is way more fun than being the status quo.

Image courtesy of Peter Lloyd.

The Foggy History of Hangovers

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That’s why writing a column like this one is a pretty plum gig. No matter how innocuous the topic might sound, you’ll inevitably come across a story that seems totally bizarre to our modern sensibility if you’re willing to dig deep enough. So with this month’s theme of hangovers, I was sure I was once again in the clear — after all, what could be an easier target than the disastrous aftereffects of too much booze?

Reader, I appear before you today humbled. After spending hours poking around online, and stomping around multiple university libraries, I am here to report that hangovers are…kind of boring, historically speaking.

At first glance, this makes no sense. Getting drunk is an act that’s nearly as old as humanity itself; some researchers believe people were making alcohol even before we figured out how to grow our own crops. And as long as we’ve been drinking, we’ve been drinking too much, and then rolling around on the floor as our heads and stomachs team up to punish us for our liquid gluttony. In all that time, the course of history hasn’t been altered by a particularly nasty hangover or two?

Well, it has. We just don’t know about it. In truth, the reason the history of hangovers isn’t all that weird is because, unlike a lot of things, they aren’t some mysterious experience that science can only explain retroactively. The cause and effect are fairly obvious, and has been understood as such at least as far back as ancient Greece: Drink too much, and you’ll pay for it later. So stop talking about it so loudly, and pass me the Advil already.

Not that that dissuaded anyone from partaking in the first place, of course. The Greeks loved their wine so much that they created a party god, Dionysus, who was responsible for the all-important grape crop. They also believed that people who preferred water to alcohol weren’t just boring, but actually smelled bad. The Greeks didn’t believe in a hangover god, though (an unusual omission that would later inspire author Terry Pratchett to invent one). Instead, they knew to seek out better-quality alcohols, and, when all else failed, to sleep the rest of the day away.

No matter the part of the world, wherever alcohol appeared, hangovers weren’t far behind. And each culture grappled with them in its own way. The oldest-known Arabic cookbook, from the tenth century, suggested adding an early kind of lemonade to your alcohol to stop a hangover before it started, and if that didn’t work, downing a bowl of yogurt-y stew called kishkiyya.

In the exceedingly formal society of sixteenth-century Japan, meanwhile, it was considered polite after an alcohol-heavy event to demonstrate the extent of one’s hangover — even if you didn’t actually have one. To fake it, people would send late thank-you notes to the host, written with intentionally sloppy handwriting.

But if humans have long understood the what of hangovers, sometimes a little too well — I’m partial to Kingsley Amis’s description, from Lucky Jim, of feeling like you’ve “somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beat up by secret police” — they continued to struggle to understand the how. However, hangovers are starting to get their due from scientists. Recent studies have tried to break hangovers down into their constituent parts, from dehydration to nausea to a catch-all category of leftover fermentation chemicals in your stomach called “congeners.”

Still, the search for a cure remains as elusive as ever. In fact, by far the weirdest part of hangovers isn’t their past, but their future. As we speak, plenty of private companies are hard at work on developing a workaround — all that remains to be seen is which version gets to market first, and which one takes off with the public. Will it be RU-21, a Russian-made pill originally developed by the KGB? Or the tea company Tetley, which plans to roll out a special hangover tea by 2026? Or how about one of the many groups working on so-called “synthetic alcohol,” which is supposed to manipulate and massage the neurotransmitters that give us the feeling of being drunk?

Personally, I’ve learned to avoid the problem by drinking two beers and then quitting. But the estimated $148 billion that hangovers cost the U.S. economy in lost productivity each year suggests that a more pressing solution might be useful.

Sticky Situation

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This past December, a town in Germany made international headlines when a local chocolate factory’s storage tank ruptured, literally repaving the streets with a layer of chocolatey goo so thick it took 25 firefighters armed with shovels, blowtorches, and hot water to chip it all away.

The story was a funny little curio, to be sure. But for fans of weird history, it also couldn’t help but bring to mind one of the oddest and most infamous events of food-related disaster on record: the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. And since I haven’t covered it in these pages yet—and also because it just celebrated (if that’s the right word, which it isn’t) its centenary in January—now feels like as good a time as any to dive back in and get reacquainted.

The date is January 15, 1919. The scene: the North End neighborhood in Boston. There, by the harbor, sits a massive, 90-foot-wide tank capable of holding more than two million gallons of molasses, which at the time was being imported from the Caribbean to be distilled into rum and ethanol. But this was no ordinary molasses tank. No, this tank was an incredibly shoddy molasses tank. It was built a few years earlier for the nearby Purity Distilling Company, but for some reason was never properly tested, and problems were evident early on. For one, the tank had a leak so bad that local kids figured out they could bring over empty cans and scoop up the dregs for free. When notified of this issue, the project manager responded by having the tank painted a molasses-y shade of brown, so that the leaks would be harder to see.

On that fateful January afternoon, the gigantic tank, full nearly to the brim after a recent deposit, split open for good. 

“A dull, muffled roar gave but an instant’s warning before the top of the tank was blown in the air,” wrote the New York Times the following day. And the ensuing wave of molasses that flooded the streets of Boston was nothing short of surreal. Eyewitnesses estimated the wave was between 8 and 15 feet high, and it moved at 35 miles per hour—in every direction. In a matter of seconds, two full city blocks were submerged.

The explosion devastated the surrounding area. The gooey wave moved so quickly it caught bystanders before they were able to get to higher ground. Even when the molasses leveled off at about knee height, cooling in the winter temperatures, it was still so sticky that people couldn’t escape easily. 

“Here and there struggled a form,” wrote the Boston Globe, “whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell.” Meanwhile, the force of the explosion itself toppled several buildings and destroyed a chunk of an elevated rail line shortly after the train had passed over it. In all, 21 people were killed, and another 150 were seriously injured. The last victim wasn’t found for more than 10 days.

After an inquiry that lasted three years, an auditor found that the tank wasn’t built to construction standards, and for a long time, it was assumed that the rivets were to blame, in conjunction with a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide inside the tank. More recently, however, a local engineer, who studies the flood as a hobby, found the type of steel used in the tank was, in fact, the main culprit.

While not considered a risk at the time, engineers now know that this kind of steel is too brittle, and therefore more likely to crack under duress. In this case, the steel was also only half as thick as it should have been, given how much liquid the tank was meant to hold. This same steel was also used in the construction of the Titanic, which is not generally a comparison anyone wants to be part of.

Following the inquiry, the company that owned the tank, U.S. Industrial Alcohol, was forced to pay $600,000 (roughly $6.5 million by today’s standards) in settlements. Cleanup in the surrounding blocks took weeks, and far longer in all of the outlying areas and corners to which the molasses ultimately spread. And once the streets were officially scrubbed clean of the deadly, sticky mess, reports persisted of the smell of molasses in central Boston for decades afterwards.

Please Stop Being Outraged: The Culture War Isn’t New

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Pity the rookie combatants in today’s culture wars. It can’t be easy to join a battle that’s been waged since before they were born and to think it’s new. I’m talking about free-speech warriors in neatly pressed Fred Perrys and un-scuffed boots, collecting their “blocked by” Twitter designations like medals, and howling their God-given right to make rape “jokes.”

All the young dudes hoping history will judge the video games they play to be as cool as rock ’n’ roll—a cohort of guys who, when they’re no longer young, seconds from sliding toward the great apolitical beyond, will—like dying Confederate soldiers picturing their mothers’ faces — envision Eminem himself laying a cooling hand upon their wrinkled foreheads.

As a veteran of the music-culture wars, I remember Tipper Gore’s denunciation of both the Dead Kennedys and Prince back in the eighties. It was alarming. Moreover, I’ve been engaging in lengthy arguments in defense of some sketchy black metal since the 1990s. I like to think, then, that my take on these rookies—the boys who are proud—has more behind it than the jerk of a knee.

If you’ve never heard of Hollywood’s Hays Code (puritanical censorship of movie sexuality), or Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent (comic books create juvenile delinquents, it argued), or the hysteria about jazz (“It’s the music of drug-using Negroes!”), followed by hysteria about rock ’n’ roll, disco, porn, punk, Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, hip-hop, and more, then yes, it must seem like we’re living in very combative times indeed. And we are! But not more so than any other. It only feels that way if you’re a person who really, really wants to wear that Burzum shirt onstage, or thinks that any episode past the second one of the new Roseanne was funny.

Maybe we’re at war, maybe we’re not. Far be it from me to diminish anyone’s heroic narrative. But this idea that cultural clashing has our country doomed? C’mon, it took almost 200 years for Rome to fall. Unless America peaked in 1812 (and unless you think Tchaikovsky’s famous overture was about the British burning the White House, when it was about Napoleon in Russia), we should be okay at least until the end of Radiohead’s album cycle.

I have perspective—and not because I’m a nerd. While I wear glasses and have weird breath, I’m not really smart enough to be a proper nerd. I’m using the broader, original definition of the word, the one that means being good at science and math, as opposed to being a guy who worships mass-media franchises like Star Wars so much he’ll send death threats about casting. But I’m nerdy enough to have a passing interest in the last hundred years of popular culture and, baby, let me tell you, it was turbulent.

Comedian Lenny Bruce and crooner Frank Sinatra (pre-Republican version) both got fucked with. There were laws against dancing that are still on the books. Weird as it may seem in a world where all moms have terrible tattoos, I remember a time when a mohawk and ripped shirt could get you beaten to within an inch of your life. What made it especially wild was that, for the most part, the culture wars were fought by artists, African-Americans, and gays on one side, and organized religion and the truncheon-wielding state on the other.

It wasn’t until the disco backlash—where rockers and long-hairs across the country, forgetting that Little Richard himself once sang about anal sex, waged a record-burning war on the infernal blackness and gayness of this glittery dance music—that sectors of the general population took the initiative. But by 1985, Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center had restored the gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair about bumping-uglies content in art to its rightful, bureaucratic place: Washington, D.C.

In the 1990s, with the advent of the term “political correctness,” we witnessed harbingers of today’s culture wars. Fugazi and their ilk bummed out thousands of punks by demanding they do less shoving of strangers at their shows. That the prerogative to take a running jump from a stage prior to crashing on someone’s head would be seen as a cultural imperative might arguably be considered fucking insane, but then again, “go my own way” non-neighborliness, “don’t tread on me” politics, and, for that matter, states’ rights, are as much a part of the American identity as the Freedom March.

That strain of solipsistic individualism won the frontier West, and pointing out the human cost to this expansion is pure sissydom, they argue, so you can understand why so many young men hated Bikini Kill. It’s like those bitches hated fun.

Somehow, despite the reign of PC terror, Nu Metal and VICE still happened, so maybe, just maybe, the dour cultural killjoys weren’t as powerful as some put-upon dudes thought. Or maybe the “culture wars” are not, in fact, wars; they’re just culture. Nobody wins or loses and the sides overlap. It’s just the push and pull and cyclical noise we all make together.

In fairness, I should acknowledge that friends and peers of a more—cough—libertarian bent make an (occasionally) potent argument that, in the year of our Lord 2018, leftists have taken over the government’s role as art- and freedom-haters. They argue that not everything has to be political, and that uptight, indoctrinated squares are constantly rallying their online mobs to crush any art or opinions that stray from (cultural Marxist) orthodoxy.

I don’t disagree that perpetual outrage can be a hell of a drug, and of course some people really are just puritans—in the thirties, they’d have been Stalinists—but I just can’t muster the rhetorical reach to equate hard-rock band Black Pussy losing shows in Portland because of their name with, say, President George W. Bush denouncing Ice-T’s band Body Count for “Cop Killer.” The difference in power dynamics is just too vast.

It maybe doesn’t help that some of the most strident voices railing against social-justice warriors are people like Brett Kavanaugh’s conservative crony Mark Judge, a sometime music writer, who, while denouncing a fellow music writer’s argument against cultural appropriation, bizarrely referenced Sonic Youth’s novelty side-project, Ciccone Youth.

As with most situations in our time of degraded discourse, it’s the dummies and dullards who get the most clicks, so it’s easy enough to find examples of pure insanity on both sides (yes, I can think of examples of said dummies on my side of the fracas, but I’m not going to name them because they’re hella embarrassing).

But idiots on both sides is not the same as “very fine people on both sides.” While I like a bit of nuance now and again, if your beef is in exact accordance with that of the state—in other words, you view your opponents as mouthy, marginalized miscreants shitting in capitalism’s punchbowl—you’re perhaps not the free-speech underdog you imagine yourself to be.

It’s been a rough few months for those staring back at me from across the field of cultural combat. Two bands not exactly noted for their liberal uptightness, Texas thrashers Power Trip and New York hatecore pioneers Sheer Terror, have both publicly stated that Proud Boys are not welcome at their shows. I don’t imagine it’s fun when musicians you’ve delusionally decided share your worldview want nothing to do with your eternal crybabyness. Culture war is hell when metalheads and skinheads both agree that you’re too evil to live and too corny to kill.

At least the alt-right can take some comfort in the fact that the army, police, and every branch of government is in their corner. It must be nice to know that, in this grand clash of civilizations, this Custer’s Last Stand against dark-skinned Star Wars cast additions—not to mention rappers who decry your use of the N-word even though they use it, and comic book-ruining feminazi hordes—your President Dad has a shit-ton of guns and will wait outside the show in case you get picked on in the mosh pit.

A comfort, for sure, but one that hardly makes for a sexy T-shirt.

We tried to point out the irony in being outraged about people being outraged, but editors as a rule do not readily appreciate nuance. … Apparently readers find it boring. Who knew? … Gosh, without editors we’d apparently all be really stupid. Thank goodness for them, then.]

UnYourself: Why Won’t My Wife Fuck Me?

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Here’s the main lesson I learned from writing my memoir Unwifeable: If I had not done all that painful work to ultimately “own” everything I feared made me unwifeable, I never would have been able to —i n the end —find the partner of my dreams.

This archetypal go-to-battle-with-your-demons lesson is called by many names. There’s “lean in” and “the hero’s journey” and “phoenixes rising from the ashes.” In the book The Gnostic Gospels one particularly illu minating passage reads: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

It’s one of those universal truths that intersects with all the great stories. The darkness you fear most will often present you with the Battle Of Your Life. Confront it valiantly, and only then, can you achieve far greater freedom than you ever imagined.

Consider the very first episode of Game of Thrones, for example. A series-defining moment occurs when the “imp” Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) tells Jon Snow (Kit Harington) to stop protesting when people call him a “bastard.”

“Let me give you some advice, bastard,” Tyrion says. “Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.”

Truly, there is so much vulnerability and power in confronting ourselves. Scared you are unworthy? Nervous you are unsuccessful? Afraid you will be forever unlovable? Well, that’s why I’m calling this advice column “Un Yourself.” Let’s turn the paradigms upside down, inside out and confront it all.

But now, let’s go forth and tackle the first question to UnYourself. And boy is it ever a doozy.

Sexless In Not Really Seattle writes: “I haven’t had sex with my wife for ten years. I’ve given up that it will ever happen again, and I do admit that my resentment seeps into our relationship. What can I do?”

Dear SINRS (amazing acronym there, by the way):

Most people will not admit it, because this is one of those insidious plagues that is simply not discussed in polite society, but your challenge is more common than you may think.

Marriage is one of the hardest—and some evolutionary biologists would argue “most unnatural”—institutions in the world. There are so many damn advice books out there (Men Are From Dickbags, Women Are From Cuntfucks, etc.), but not to worry because—guess what—I have read them all! “Why?” you may ask. Well, two reasons, really.

1) As a “sex and love” reporter, I have been forced to read more of them than the average person just on account of it being my dumb job.

2) Honestly, I just really love self-help.

First things first, when it comes to marriage, the gold standard here is Dr. John Gottman—and, by extension, the scientific research conducted at the Gottman Institute.

For a taste of exactly how science comes into play in the studies he’s done, I recommend this extraordinary segment on This American Life.

In the episode, the researchers at the Gottman Institute are able to predict, with almost total accuracy, which marriages will stay together and which will not. How do they do it? Easy. The study participants are asked to discuss a sensitive topic of disagreement. As they either bicker and escalate or quibble and calm one another down, the researchers take to coding all of their interactions (an eyeball or a sarcastic sigh, for instance, might be marked as “contempt”).

What they find is that you don’t actually need to agree with your person about everything. Because everyone disagrees. Some marital researchers even posit that the No. 1 predictor of divorce is conflict avoidance. Until that wondrous day when we are able to clone a version of ourselves just to fuck over and over again as our AI-Me sycophantically agrees with every word we say, cheering us on and on as we bad-decision-it-up into personal apocalypse, we will always be forced to deal with—contemptuous sarcastic sigh here—other people.

For the longest time, do you know what grudge I nursed above practically all others?

I was so pissed at men who did not follow to a T the imagined script I had set out for them.

Men were terrible.

More often than not, this irrational resentment decreased my sex drive.

Like your wife, I did not start out this way.

To get my sex drive back, I needed to confront severe, deeply buried issues of incredible contempt and resentment simmering beneath the surface.

Similar to my eventual realization that other people are not actually disappointing or offending me by failing to follow some imagined script I wrote for them in my head, sometimes your wife’s issues of contempt and resentment might be illogical.

But oh my God how deeply it is in play.

And if you love her: It needs to be honored, respected, and validated. Because, like you, she really is doing her best with what she has. She’s not trying to be unreasonable. She’s just trying to protect herself.

You can only understand, to use a Jaws metaphor, what size boat you’ll need (therapy, a divorce, or a sort of modern understanding wherein your wife agrees you can meet sexual needs and desires outside of the marriage) when you accurately understand just how big the damn shark is in the first place.

This means ignoring Mayor Larry Vaughn, dude.

Or in this case, all the terrible advice pushing you to either cheat or take the seething martyr route and suck it up as a consequence of A) you cheating years ago, B) you traveling too much for your job, C) forgetting her birthday this year, or D) whatever ingrained self-loathing from your childhood you’ve projected onto your wife and circumstances.

The reality is that the only way you can figure out the root of the problem and develop an informed plan for what to do is to uncover the true nature of what caused your marriage to break in the first place.

Because a sexless marriage is a broken one.

Now I have several friends who are the smartest individuals I know who are just dead-set against therapy, so I know exactly how difficult it is to convince someone to see a shrink. In fact, for many years it was impossible to convince me to see one. But then I discovered something that shifted my whole perspective: Seeing a shrink is no different than going on a first date.

As in, check this out, you can just make up an excuse to leave. So many people feel like because they’ve had one or two or 29 bad experiences that all psychiatrists are worthless. Interesting fact: Not true.

The secret is to develop a litmus test and do research as if your mental health life depends on it. Because it does. My favorite strategy: Ask for recommendations from smart folks who you know do not tolerate fools.

But first let’s validate your concern: Yes, many shrinks are drawn to the field because they are indeed bat-shit crazy themselves. However, there are just as many who have done the difficult psychotherapeutic work to slay their pesky, meddling egos in order to best help you learn how to slay your own.

The speech I was given that finally got me to go see a psychiatrist came from a doctor friend of mine.

As I told him about all of my bad experiences with shoddy therapists who had given me awful advice or whom I simply did not think were smart, he listened patiently. “I don’t need to see a shrink,” I protested. “I write morning pages every day, and I have some great friends who I can talk to about my problems.”

“Mandy,” he said, “your writing can’t talk back. And your friends don’t have the training.”

What do you know: The doc was right.

Eventually, when you really do the work to find the right marriage counselor and/or personal therapist to unravel what shit is going on in your sexless marriage, you’ll be able to develop a tactical plan to what you can do in the future.

When you have that, then you can start communicating in terms that will not be alienating, resentment-filled, and cruel, as so many (and definitely me) often resort to because abuse and trauma and resentment shaped our internal roadmap.

Here’s the carrot I can promise you, too.

Life — and sex — gets ah-fucking-mazing when you start the journey. Trust me on this one.

To even bring up some of these incredibly sensitive topics with your wife, I recommend a book that was a game-changer for me.

It has a weird name, but the principles are revolutionary. It’s called: Nonviolent Communication.

If you want another reason to read it, consider this: The very sexy Manhattan Madam first recommended it to me when I was in the initial stages of courtship with my now-husband and she was in prison, and we emailed every week about what the hell was going on in our vastly different life situations.

“Read that book,” she said, and holy fuck, the Manhattan Madam was right.

It teaches you how to communicate in a way that strips most of our natural instincts to condemn, brutalize, blame, and be wantonly cruel by bringing up are always at the ready Wrongs That Have Been Committed Against Us That We Can Use Against Another Person So As to Justify Whatever Shitty Thing We Have Just Done or Said.

Because once you start to chip away at all of the bullshit that has created a sexual ice block in your relationship, you can actually figure out how to start fucking again.

The principles of nonviolent communication break down to a four-step process which is: observing what is going on without judgment, clarifying the feeling this situation creates, identifying what need this triggers for you, and then, in a kind and positive way, formulating your request.

If you want some sample scripts (and good advice), read this

Kiwi husband’s tale about how contempt eroded his wife’s ability to feel like she could enjoy sex, and he was trying desperately to use the principles of NVC to save their relationship. The Reddit community chimes in with an array of helpful sample scripts he might be able to use, including this one:

“It sounds like you are really scared to just talk about your needs such that it is easier for you to say ‘sex just isn’t who I am.’ If that’s the case, I feel sad because I want to meet my needs and your needs as well.”

To even broach the topic initially, certified sex coach Hillary Berry gives this terrific template example:

“Honey, when I noticed that you froze and withdrew from me last night when I tried to initiate sexual touch, I felt discouraged because I enjoy sharing touch and I want to connect with you intimately. Can you let me know what was going on with you in that moment?”

Of course, if you haven’t had sex in a decade the script would likely read more along the lines of:

“I love you so much, and I feel so discouraged by what’s happened between us over the years. Being physically close to my partner is an important need for me, and I’d love to start the process of talking so that I can be meeting your needs as well.”

Now, let’s just say that you’ve done all of this already and the issue that is at play is an age-old predicament when two people who have been fucking each other forever simply get sick of each other and fall into a routine. The wife is upstairs with her vibrator, you’re on PornHub, and the emotional disconnect is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Well, I have good news for you.

All hope is not lost!

A whole new world of discovery exists out there for you if you can keep an open mind and be kind to your wife as you bring her into the process as something that can benefit you both.

If you don’t write about sex regularly, it’s easy to not be aware of how much progress has been made in the field of re-invigorating sex lives that used to be considered DOA.

Sexual doulas and sexual medicine and sexologists and sex coaches and female-vetted tantric practitioners. Orgy domes and sex clubs and kinky play parties. Chakrubs and secret favorites and utterly innovative new robotic devices like the Osé that mimic the sensation of a blended orgasm.

Say your wife has trouble orgasm-ing. Consider finding a specialist who can assist in ways that will likely turn both of you on. The practice of “orgasmic meditation” is trendy AF (and totally cult-ish), but like most organizations that advertise “you too can attain a level of higher consciousness if you spend enough money,” there are some great core lessons about how to stroke the clit that are gangbusters effective.

Visit women-friendly sex shops like Babeland and make your wife a co-conspirator on a journey of re-igniting your love life together. Talk to people who make you feel safe and get their tips for how they get turned on and how they come.

Here’s a for-instance. Several years ago, I mistakenly believed butt plugs were only meant for gay dudes until some sweet bisexual girl told me that nothing increased her orgasm like a butt plug—and boom, pop, she was right!

Really talk to your wife, make her feel safe (using those sample scripts or some authentic variant thereof), and no matter what, try to be aware of all those little things that men do that make women feel like shit—and don’t fucking do them.

I’m talking about the little emotional affairs with hot chicks. Nothing turns off a woman like making her feel like shit. You may not even realize you are doing it. Find out. Ask her. Actively try to make her feel special and safe.

Because I promise you: Make your wife feel like it’s the two of you against the world, and pretty soon, the world of sexual miracles will come to you.