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Urge
Through the hooking glass
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[08/26/99]

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Lesbian blind date
Nancy calls upon a mismatched couple and can't decide which lie is the truth.
By Tracy Quan
[08/26/99]

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According to Houston, Bowen told her, "Jasmin's stepping down from her title. He looked at me and, 'Houston, you want to come back with a bang?'"

Why would anyone want a video of "The Houston 500"? "It's history," says Houston. We are in a small dressing room at Cityscapes, a strip club in Long Island City months before the event.

"Records are all made to be broken," says Charly Frye, her dance manager. He wears ostrich-skin cowboy boots and has a habit of brushing his palms together, as if washing his hands of the whole affair. Charly and Houston begin a conversational relay race, with every sentence a fragment to be completed or cheered on by the other.

"This is ... a day -- " Charly begins.

" -- an event!"

"This is Woodstock -- "

"You watch the Discovery Channel. And you watch volcanoes erupting," says Frye. "It's really not the most exciting thing ... but it's so monumental."

"What happens is we get fascinated with excess," says Ted McIllvenna, president of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. "It's like the guy who watches 47 football games on the weekend. The fact that it's sexual doesn't have very much to do with anything."

"No, no. It's not about sex," Houston says to me. "[The guys are] in and out. It's an event. It's a world record. It's just a freak show, basically. It's for fucking freaks. I mean, I wouldn't watch it. I have Jasmin's video and I still haven't watched it."

"I think the mood of this," says Charly, chiming in calmly, "is more of a documentary."

Houston took the concept to Metro. "It wasn't like I was out hunting for someone to do the world's biggest gangbang," says Greg Alves, vice president of Metro, who owns the rights to Gangbangs I and II. "Somebody came to me and said, 'Look, I'd love to do this.'"

Metro printed up glossy "banger applications" distributed wherever Houston was dancing, took out ads coast-to-coast and, most importantly, got her on Howard Stern three times.

One of those segments aired on Stern's CBS late-night program, where Houston was seen by Ed Goldstone of Visionary Entertainment, a mainstream personal manager with clients including David Boreanaz, from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." He's hoping to add Houston to his roster.

"She's a comedienne. And I honestly think that she's got such a potential that I'm ready to test it," said Goldstone from his Sunset Blvd. offices. The plan is to start Houston in acting lessons and begin grooming her for auditions.

"They think they can get me on a TV program within a year," Houston says. "I mean, [it's] just a sure fact that I got called from a mainstream agent that thinks I'm this diamond in the rough, you know what I mean? That's what they literally said to me." And what did she say when Goldstone told her that dreams do come true, and she really is that special? "I'm like, gee, maybe I really do have something that I just don't realize," says Houston. "You know?"

"It's not that easy," says Ron Jeremy, with a knowing shake of his head. With over two decades in porn, the paunchy Jeremy has something approaching mainstream fame -- cameos on "News Radio," a small part in "Killing Zoe" -- but he also knows the texture of the cutting-room floor. He was edited out of "Ronin," and NBC passed on a pilot called "Odd-Jobs," where he was to have a recurring role. But he's in the film "Boondock Saints" with Sean Patrick Flannery and Willem Dafoe. "I have a major role in that. I play Vincenzo the gangster," he says. I move to turn off my tape recorder, but Jeremy will have none of it. "No, no, no, you want to get this ..." he says. Everyone, it seems, is looking to go mainstream; from the unscratchable but cold hardcore to the fluid, effortless mainstream.

In the weeks leading up to the event, I do phone interviews with Houston at 1 a.m. This is the best time for her, after she has come home from court-mandated alcohol counseling (following a DUI) and has tucked her daughter in.

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