Prologue

“Smut!”

That’s my Grandma Maria talking. We’re in her kitchen in South Philly. I’m about fourteen and I’m sitting on a pink barstool at a gray-speckled Formica countertop. I’m eating something amazing like broccoli and spaghetti or hot buttered Italian rolls from Cacia’s Bakery. But I’m also listening carefully because I know exactly what she’s talking about, and it’s a story I’ve been waiting to hear for a long, long time.

“He was involved in that smut!” she said, shaking her hands wildly to punctuate the end of her sentence.

This was something I imagined a churchgoer might say in righteous indignation, flurries of spit flying from twisted lips, a rosary twitching in her hand. But that wasn’t really my Grandma Maria, my mom’s mom. The only time she entered a church was for weddings or funerals, and she would roll her eyes as my grandfather diligently went off to church every Sunday morning. Maria was a free-thinking, hell-on-wheels type who, once safely outside of church, would cast aside a Bible quicker than a dead rat. She always said “religion was for the weak minded.”

So it was strange to hear her so passionately wield the word smut against my father.

Now the family’s dirty secret was becoming more real to me. It was something always whispered about, and let’s just say I’d always sensed what went on with my dad. But I didn’t really know any of the nasty details. I knew my father, Anthony Battista, had been arrested ten years before, in the mid-1970s, for distributing a movie about sex, and I knew that many legal troubles had followed. But why someone would be in trouble about a movie was still a mystery to me. I just didn’t know how to ask about this. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. I was a kid and sex was just a beautiful rumor for me. Sex had more to do with the most popular girl in school, Diane, “liking” the coolest guy, Chris, or whatever their names were. I was a teenager, at an age when the meaning of sex was just beginning to change. It would no longer be about holding hands in the hallway.

What Grandma Maria told me about my father didn’t ruin what sex meant for me; it just added a complicated dimension. My gutsy grandma was the first person who would challenge me to face the truth about my dad’s involvement in pornography. I suppose telling me this was her way of protecting me in what she saw as my long haul through a life of stigma. The way she saw it, many people, rightly or wrongly, believed that being associated with pornography was shameful. This was also a form of commiseration.

I sat on the pink barstool, watching Grandma Maria move from stove to sink, stirring a big pot of gravy and frying meatballs. It sure sounded like my dad had done something bad. But so what? I knew everything would turn out okay. On the other hand, I realized that my father’s involvement in pornography was the most notorious thing that had happened in our family.

I just listened to her and marveled that our family sounded more interesting than any TV show like Dynasty, Dallas, or Falcon Crest. Talking while cooking, Grandma Maria experienced this family event like it had happened yesterday. She flashed between anger, tears, and reflection at different points in her storytelling. She said, “But I love your father, he always did right by you,” and then in the next breath she would accuse him of being a bastard and doing horrible things to her daughter. Obviously she was conflicted about her son-in-law’s complicated career. And so was I.

“How did he get involved with that movie?” I asked her.

“Well, Mommy,” she said (“Mommy” was her funny nickname for all her grandkids), “you know your Uncle Tony got him involved. I never trusted Uncle Tony all that much.”

“Uncle Tony” was Anthony Arnone, and he was not really my uncle but rather my father’s close friend from college. When I was growing up, anyone close to my family became “Uncle This” or “Aunt That” and this naming happened as if the DNA of the person became bonded to my family’s DNA out of thin air. These honorary titles always indicated if you were in or out of the family’s good graces. People who fell out of favor were suddenly called by their first names again, or worse, just “son of a bitch.”

So as Grandma Maria told me this story, it was really hard for me to fathom why my father would want to work in the porn business. Someone doesn’t just stumble into the porn industry, does he? It wasn’t like a guy standing on a street corner had flashed my father the inside of his trench coat and said, “You wanna work in porn?” rather than “You wanna buy a watch?” Clearly, this was not a common career path or something you studied in college.

“I guess it was about August of 1973,” Grandma Maria explained. “Right before your third birthday, your father got a call from Uncle Tony to see if he wanted to distribute that dirty movie in the Philadelphia area. They’d already opened their smutty theater, The Premier, in Orlando. Of course I didn’t know anything when it was happening. Cloak and dagger, you know. Only found out after the fact.”

Apparently my mother had kept Grandma Maria on a need-to-know basis, and I sensed that, for Grandma Maria, keeping secrets was as serious a crime as kidnapping or murder or, for that matter, dealing in porn.

“He had a good job as a stockbroker, Mommy, so I don’t understand why he did such a stupid thing. Your mother . . .” Her voice quivered and she placed her hands to her forehead. Then she ran the hot water and started to clean the pots and pans. Grandma Maria regained her composure as the bubbles of the soapy water rose. I realized cleaning must have had a calming effect for her.

I grabbed a dishtowel and dried the pans as she handed them to me. “Your mother suffered so much,” she went on. “When I got the call from your mother that your father was arrested, I just didn’t know what to think.”

I doubt anyone had known what to think. Sort of like when you discover your neighbor is a drug dealer or the seemingly happiest couple on Earth suddenly gets divorced because of the husband’s affair with a babysitter. It makes people feel uncomfortable, even violated, when they discover that such shocking secrets have been kept from them. It’s a betrayal of trust.

Before his arrest, my father had been a top salesman at W. E. Hutton, a huge investment company in Philadelphia. The money was good and everyone thought of him as very successful. He’d even scored a free trip to Hawaii for selling mutual fund products. I have often envisioned my parents on that trip, sitting under palm trees in lounge chairs with tropical drinks in hand and crystal clear water lapping at their feet. Having already tasted paradise, why would my father sell porn?

The possibilities as to why are endless. Maybe such a person simply loves naked women, like a lot. Or the person is a closet pervert and working in porn is the perfect opportunity to make his shameful hobby into a career. It’s also a great job for a voyeur, someone who has tired of peeking through bedroom windows and now wants the chance to admire willing exhibitionists. Or could it have been a love of avant-garde films?

No. None of these reasons made sense. My father wasn’t a pervert. He wasn’t into obscure films. He had an economics degree, which wasn’t controversial at all. He even voted for Nixon!

The only logical choice, as I saw it then, and as I see it now, was the money. Deep Throat had an enticing, high-profit allure. My father must have thought, This is hot, so people all over the country are going to pay to see it. And if you’ve got an in on distribution and its big margin, well then you’d be a fool to pass it up. My father’s job at W. E. Hutton and the high-powered business culture and the trips to Hawaii must not have been enough to keep him from picking this nice ripe apple dangling from the tree.

By the time Grandma Maria and I were finished talking that day, it was late and the kitchen that had been a huge mess earlier in the evening was now spotlessly clean. You could eat off the floor in my grandmother’s kitchen.

“So did you ever forgive him, Grandma?” I asked.

“Of course, Mommy. He gave me you, the best granddaughter in the world,” Grandma Maria said in a lighthearted way designed to keep my image of my father intact.

It was time to go. I left that day with more questions than answers. But at least I knew a little bit more. I wondered if what my father did was wrong. It was hard for me to imagine he would break the law or hurt anyone. He was always a kind and generous person and a loving father. As a husband, he seemed to struggle and there was always strain in my parents’ relationship that I didn’t fully understand. Over the next several years, as I matured into an adult, I would learn much more, which I detail on the following pages. Between my memories as a child during the time my dad distributed Deep Throat and hearing stories from my Grandma Maria and other family members, I realized that my father was like a jigsaw puzzle with a million little pieces, and I was always trying to see the full picture.