Out and About in the East Village, Part 1

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Eric Danville
Occupation: Managing Editor, Penthouse Forum Magazine. Author of "The Complete Linda Lovelace"
Location: Sophie’s on 5th between A and B
Time: 6:45 on Thursday, February 27

I am originally from Hazlet, New Jersey, but from the time I was 18, I’ve been mostly living in downtown New York. I went to school at Pace University — the same college that Al Goldstein went to. I was a journalism major. I knew early on that I would have something to do with writing and I started doing music reviews for the paper. I dug it. I was obsessed with Hunter Thompson and I read "Hell's Angels" when I was like 8 years old, so I had that whole thing with me.

The only magazines I ever wanted to work on, and I knew this from a very early age, were Mad Magazine, National Lampoon or High Times. And when I was a journalism major, I said, ‘I have to work for Al Goldstein.’ Right before I graduated, there was a payphone outside the dorms and I called up Goldstein’s Screw Magazine office one day and said, ‘Look, I go to Pace University, I’m graduating with a BA in English, a writing degree,’ and I told them I wanted to interview for a job. Surprise, surprise, I didn’t get a call.

After college, a couple friends of mine who were friends with John Holmstrom, who was working at High Times, told me that High Times needed someone for a photo shoot. They said, ‘Yeah, Eric will probably do it.’ They were doing a photo shoot at a bar where there was supposed to be this big party scene and different people were different gags. I was someone who was having a bad trip on acid and they bring me out of it by dumping a pot of spaghetti on my head. So I sat there with a pot of spaghetti on my head and they took pictures. Holmstrom thought it was hilarious. I asked him if I could send him my resume and a couple months later they hired me. They asked me in the interview, ‘Do you smoke pot?’ I think he saw this ‘oh, shit’ look in my face and he told me, ‘This is the one place you are allowed to answer the question honestly.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I hadn’t gotten high in a year.’ They didn’t hold that against me. So yeah, it was actually worth it having a pot of spaghetti stuffed on my head.

I was the managing editor at High Times for three years. It was the first real job that I had in magazine production and the first job that I really liked. It was a lot of fun to work there and you could smoke pot in the office. Everyone thinks that High Times is a bunch of stoners, which they are, but they are really good for giving young people who are ambitious and have something to offer a good slot at doing something. They teach them how to do it. John Holmstrom taught me a lot of what I know about the publishing business, copy, flow, and managing. He gave me a good work ethic.

There were so many stories from working for High Times — going to pot rallies and almost getting busted. I remember being at these rallies and looking out the window or down the street and seeing guys in rubber soled shoes and white ties taking pictures of me. One time it took us 11 hours to drive in a fucking psychedelic Ken Kesey style school bus out to the University of Michigan for their Hash Bash pot rally. 11 fucking hours. There was like a hole in the bottom of the bus by the end. It was a mess. The bus actually broke down and we all had to find our way back to New York. I had to get to Cleveland to fly home. I don’t even remember how I did that. There were a lot of stories like that.

The favorite piece I was involved with back then was on something called Syncro-Energizers. They had a brief shining moment in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. We were always looking for different ways of achieving an altered consciousness. They are in the same family as sensory deprivation tanks. Syncro-Energizers are a set of goggles that don’t have lenses. They have lights that go around your eyes and the lights blink in different configurations. You then put on these headphones and you hear different beeps in different combinations that go along with the lights. Then you just lie down. It was a big studio that you would get it done in and there was a machine that was a foot by eight inches that was very expensive. It would allow the person to control what type of meditation you wanted to experience. Did you want to get really deep down? Did you want to stimulate your creativity? Did you want to relax? They would have different settings for that.

They were fucking awesome. I swear to God it was one of the greatest drugs I’ve ever done. You put those things on you and you think you’re waking up two minutes later and you’ve been out for an hour. You are so relaxed. It was explained to me that it takes you to a level of theta brain activity that it takes yogis 20 years to attain. Amazing devises. They had a good run in the weird health-conscious late ‘80s and then they just disappeared.

Working at High Times took its toll on me and after three years I was unemployed, for a year. I was applying everywhere, even Modern Bride. I got a job at a ‘men’s adult sophisticated magazine’ called Hawk, which I worked at for six months but that was way too corporate. You had to wear the suit and tie and if you were good it was no tie Friday. I hated the shoes and the whole nine yards. I was there and biding my time until a friend of mine called up from Screw and told me an editor job had opened up. I petitioned hard for that and they chose me.

I wound up working for Screw for seven years. That’s a long time for Screw — for dealing with the insanity that was Al Goldstein. Screw was more or less The Village Voice of sex; a sex newspaper that started in 1968. It was around 80 pages long with about 20 pages of editorial and 60 pages of hooker ads. Goldstein wanted it to be a dirty Mad Magazine, and basically it was.

We had great cartoonists and you couldn’t get a gig writing there unless you were a good writer. It was hilarious. Playboy was these airbrushed really nice shots, while Screw was just the dirtiest, black and white, gritty fucking pictures, that he apparently bought by the pound. Someone was selling thousands of pictures of old hippies fucking and he’s like, ‘I’ll take them all.’ There was the photo morgue that we’d go over to and they were all broken down into categories, like ‘Male Female in Bathroom,’ ‘Male Female in Library,’ ‘Male Female on the street.’ It was hilarious.

The magazine covered every personal vendetta that Goldstein wanted to carry out. It covered politics, music, art and culture. When they started cleaning up Times Square, that was a big part of what we wrote about. It was very political and very funny and it was either totally irreverent or just so of the moment. I’m so proud of having worked there. It was a great gig because I got to review porn and get paid for it. That’s always a good thing. I started meeting and hanging out with porn stars and directors and any of Goldstein’s celebrity friends. You got to meet interesting people.

I only say this now because he’s dead, but he really was the best boss that I ever had. He was incredibly, incredibly hard on people. If you fucked something up, first off, it was grounds for firing. The guy whose job I got was fired for a typo. He was the type of boss that would demand 110 percent perfection from you and that makes you raise the bar for yourself. I’m normally very hard on myself anyway but I started taking a lot of pride in what I did.

He ruled by fear but he also had these flashes of humanity. He would send you out or take you out to dinner when you did something good. He would reward you with food and it was like you were a trained dog… here’s a treat. One time he said, ‘bring a date along and we’ll go out to dinner.’ We went to the Tribeca Grill and it was Al, me, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Bernie Goetz, and one or two other people at this huge table. We’d be sitting there and someone would go, ‘Al, fuck you!’ Somebody sent over a bottle of champagne to Debbie. There was a point where I realized I was sitting in between Debbie Harry and Bernie Goetz. It was the most bizarre dinner party of my life.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Next week, Eric Danville on writing a book about Linda Lovelace.