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| This is as much of the artwork as I can show you. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Angora Fever: The Collected Short Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (BearManor Bare, 2019).
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| An issue of Boy Play. |
Synopsis: Ronnie, a dim-witted but enormously well-endowed dropout, is barricaded in his depressing, squalid apartment on a cold night in Los Angeles. He's down to his last few cans of food, and the manager wants to kick him out because he can't even pay the $5 a week rent. He'd lost his restaurant job when he was caught in a compromising position with a waitress in the storeroom. Angry after being fired, he'd unwittingly gone to a gay bar and struck up a conversation with a young man who then invited him back to his place for whiskey. The young man had offered to become Ronnie's "manager" and pimp him out, but Ronnie had responded by punching him. Now, alone in his miserable apartment and near starvation, he reconsiders the proposal.
Wood trademarks: Poverty, squalor, and the inability to pay the rent (all factors in Ed Wood's own real life); whiskey (cf. "The Hazards of the Game," "A Taste for Blood," "The Last Void"); descent into prostitution (cf. "The Hooker," "Never a Stupid Reflection").
Excerpt: "A lot of the girls, most of them that he’d ever met, fell head over heels for him. He never had any trouble in getting them to lay down and spread their legs for him. They liked what he had between his legs, and they all wanted to try him on for size. Most of them couldn’t take his entire shaft. He was built much too big for most of the girls…. But he kept trying. In fact, if he didn’t ask the girls outright, they were all set to rape him and take what they wanted."
Reflections: My colleague Greg Dziawer contributed this particular story to Angora Fever from his own collection, and it's a lively and sometimes startling example of Ed Wood's writing for gay-themed magazines. Our protagonist, Ronnie, must be Eddie's idea of a gay man's fantasy: straight, violent, well-hung, and dumb as a post. In fact, this story can be considered Ed's depiction of the phenomenon known as "rough trade." These are heterosexual, blue-collar men -- usually brutish in manner -- who allow submissive gay men to service them, often in exchange for money. In such encounters, the gay man may experience verbal or physical abuse and runs the risk of being assaulted or even robbed. It's important for Ed to point out that Ronnie is seemingly every straight woman's fantasy as well.
"Starve Hell" is also one of Ed Wood's stories about living in poverty in L.A., something he obviously knew a lot about by 1973. He writes with a lot of specificity here, as when he describes the broken-down Murphy bed in Ronnie's disgusting apartment: "The hinges had long years ago rusted away… the bed clothes smelled of silverfish and mold." That paints a picture, doesn't it? I had no idea silverfish even had a particular smell. That's the kind of detail you only get with real, first-person experience. There must have been a few occasions when Eddie, like Ronnie, ate Spam straight from the can. (In Nightmare of Ecstasy, Richard Bojarski recalls a down-and-out Eddie eating canned spaghetti with his wife.)
Incidentally, the phrase "starve hell" serves as both the title and the punchline of this little fable, but I'd never heard it before. Apparently, it was a common expression in Ed Wood's world. In fact, when I Googled the phrase, this very story was one of the top results. Was it a New York thing? Have you ever heard it?
Next: "Captain Fellatio Hornblower" (1971)