A Star is Porn

   How I Acquired The Non De Plume

 of Rusty Pliers

and

Incidentally 

Made Porno Movie History.

   I was writing the other day of horses and how they have influenced the Pliers family in one way or another since 1927, when my great Uncle JB was hung for stealing one.

   Later, as a young boy in the 1930s my father fell off a horse and couldn’t go to the toilet unaided for months. Don’t worry, the fall didn’t bust Dad’s kidneys or break his pee pee or otherwise damage his plumbing. That wasn’t why he needed help going to the bathroom. 

   No, in the fall he’d broken both his arms and temporarily couldn’t … reach it.

   That’s why he needed help in the bathroom! 

   Then in the 1950s came me. I’ve never broken anything and have always, ever since I can remember, been able to reach it. Perhaps for awhile in my teens there was even a time when I couldn’t leave it alone. 

   But life has a way of balancing out.

   All that personal interest in my plumbing served me well when I found myself in the porno industry in the nineteen-seventies. Because as in all professions, one must know and rely upon one’s equipment. I’d been bumming around Europe for a couple of years trying to paint. Yes, it was the artist’s life for me and that meant no money, so when I was really broke and couldn’t borrow anymore from anybody I answered an ad in a hippie newspaper in Paris and found myself, after a most memorable screen-test, with a ticket to Denmark and a few francs in my pocket.

   And I thought, not for the first time since becoming an artist, “What have I got to lose?”

   Back then as now, one needed a speciality to set oneself apart. Well, while we were filming I happened to notice a pair of vice grips in the opened drawer beneath my partner’s naked ass as we were humping on the kitchen counter.

   Seizing the opportunity, I introduced the vice grips in our next scenes. To everyone’s surprise the actress found it extremely stimulating so I pressed her buttons so to speak with every utensil in that drawer, including an eggbeater, the ice tongs and a funny little move with a spatula. 

   The scene was very successful. 

   Especially the happy ending.

   We did it in one take. 

   “Viola!” cried the director. He was French. My partner was from Germany. We were filming in Denmark. Yes, it was very cosmopolitan. We’d even had a little Italian for lunch.

   But he didn’t mind.

   “A star, she is born!” predicted the French director, only he didn’t mean her.

   He didn’t mean me.

   He meant the vice grips.

   So that night after a few Danish beers with the German porno actress and the rest of the crew (who were mostly Spanish) I acquired the non de plume of Rusty Pliers. We tried a few others but the German porno actress said Rusty was the best.

   She said it suited me to a tee.

   So my name became Rusty Pliers and my specialty became Fun With Tools. Hand tools mostly. Rusty ones if possible. 

   Ha! Ha! You should have seen the impossible situations they invented to have a man with a toolbox fornicate repeatedly with an enthusiastic partner! Oh boy! It makes me laugh to this day!

   Show business. There’s no business like it. That’s for sure.

   But no animal acts. I was very particular about that!

   One has to draw the line somewhere.

   We made a pretty good living in Europe in the late seventies in the porno industry, me and my tool-belt. But I blew it all seeing the sites and having fun. And I’ll say right now that nobody was ever hurt, in a way they didn’t enjoy, in the making of those great old tooled up XXX videos starring Rusty Pliers.

   But excuse me I wander.

   We were speaking of horses.