Brett Goldstein and Bobby Gordon have a lot in common. They
are both from Jewish families, both lightly bearded, both have the same brand
of mobile phone – and both are doing Fringe shows about their fathers who are
both called Howard. What's more, those fathers have skeletons in their closets.
Meeting for the first time, the two men talk about Debbie Does My Dad and Brett
Goldstein Grew Up In A Strip Club.
Bobby Gordon: My
parents were into the free love movement. My dad thought it would be really fun
to have sex with a girl in an elevator, but where would he find a girl who
would do this? Porn auditions! So he sees a porn audition, having no interest
in taking the job, but expecting a 14-floor building. It was a two-floor
building. Two weeks later he got a call back and they said, "You've got
the job." He was in the industry for about six years under the name of
Richard Pacheco. But then AIDS hit and my mom said, "Don't you think it
would be wise for one of us to stay alive to raise the children?" He
retired on a dime. I was born in 1986 when he had just retired.
Brett Goldstein: My
dad had been a bookshop owner. He got to 50 and had an enormous mid-life
crisis, left my mum and bought a strip club in Marbella. It took a year to
build that club and in that year, at no point did we think it was real. It was
like a family joke because it was so not him. He was a geeky, nice, normal,
mainstream kind of guy with his own bookshop. I went with him to audition. We
were supposed to have a conference room in a budget hotel, but they'd
double-booked and had to put us in bedroom. I was 19, young and naïve and
suddenly we were sat on the edge of a hotel bed with really young girls coming
in. It was a weird father-son bonding thing to do. I ended up going out to
Spain with my dad and running the place for a year. It was a mental blip; he
got out of it and is back together with my mother.
Gordon: What was
your relationship with your mom while you were in Marbella?
Goldstein: Marbella
is beautiful and it's full of evil. It's all ex-cons and gangsters. I was
working all the time and it became this little world I was living in. I
genuinely lost track of the real world. So with my mum, I don't think we talked
much and I didn't want her to know quite what was going on because it would
have frightened her.
Gordon: My parents
worked really hard to be OK with an open relationship. Jealousy was seen as so
square. My mom says that works if you don't care, but if you don't care then
the result is you don't care about the relationship. The part that really
resonated with me in your show is where you talk about how necessary emotions
are to sexual interaction. That's what makes the lack of jealousy impossible.
Goldstein: Our aim
was for it to be a classy topless club, but market demand meant it quickly
changed to fully nude. My dad's idea of it was this clean place, which is not
what anyone wanted. There are areas of the sex industry that can be
exploitative, I admit it, but we weren't. When we opened the club, I was really
protective of the girls. I told the security to watch and if a guy touched a
girl when she was dancing, he would be out. This went on for a week and then
one of the girls said, "It's fine." I realised they don't need
looking after. They knew what they're doing and it was all within their own
boundaries. If it did go too far, they'd just tell the man to stop.
Gordon: The way my
dad has described it to me is that porn isn’t defendable. The underbelly of
porn – the exploitation, the drugs – is very real. But he came in with a naïve,
hippy notion that sex was beautiful and lovely and he was going to change what
porn was. I knew him as this goofy, sincere, sweet man who didn't have a
misogynist bone in his body and yet society and all my friends told me that a
porn star was aggressive, macho and misogynist. He regards it as a crowning
achievement to have been a good human being in a place where it was really
difficult to be a good human being, in the same way I imagine it is difficult
to be a sensitive guy in a strip club.
Goldstein: Working
in a strip club really messed up my attitude to relationships. In a strip club,
everyone's playing a game and there was quite a while where I found it
difficult to trust people. There was one woman where in my head I thought,
"What is she trying to get out of me?" It was only at the end of it
when I realised, quite sadly, that she just liked me.
Gordon: I blushed a
lot as a kid. I was embarrassed a lot. My mom and dad raised my sisters and I
to have a really healthy view on sex and in our society that makes us
incredibly bizarre. I don't meet many people who have the same views as me.
Even though I feel healthy, I have problems finding people who feel the same
way as I do, but I'm proud of that. As a kid, learning that sex is beautiful
when it’s consensual thing spared me so much shame.
Goldstein: My mum
said she'd never have sent me if she'd have known what it was like, but it was
a hell of an adventure. I'm incredibly lucky. Whatever I say about the damage
it caused, it doesn't matter because not many people have had this experience.
I think I'm very lucky to have had that.
Brett Goldstein Grew Up In A Strip Club, Pleasance Dome, until
29 August (not 15); Debbie Does My Dad, Bedlam Theatre, until 27 August.
© Mark Fisher 2011
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