Slave to Love

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I’ve recently had the opportunity to download Slave to Love, a porn flick from 1993 starring Sierra and Brittany O’Connell.  Amidst the sea of one off scenes online, it’s always a thrill to find a full-on movie from my youth lying around.  I actually spent money on Slave to Love back in 93 because, then, you had to pay for or steal porn.  The casual sex of broadband had yet to come into our lives.

I was a freshman in college, visiting my friend in New York for the summer.  He was a diminutive architect-to-be who smelled like stale milk and suffered from psychotic episodes but, hell, he had a great place in the Village that had been in his family for several generations.  Of course, it meant being shoehorned into a tight space with a madman, but New York is New York.  It’s the only place in America that doesn’t feel like you should be building a barn, milking a cow, and praying to the corn god.  I don’t care what anyone says about their city – Chicago, DC, LA, Seattle – they’re all glorified bus depots herding the infinitely rural American mindset around.  In New York, the rules change.  Well, I guess it’s all more homogenized now.  The early 90’s, supposedly, was during the last great spike in crime in the city but, being from DC, New York’s crime rate never really phased me.   At that time, DC was the “murder capital” of the US, with as many homicides each year as New York has today.  Much more impressive when you consider DC’s small town population of half a million.  (Today, we still have three times the yearly murder rate of New York…and crime has been going down for ten years!  Talk about a city that needs Zoloft in the water supply.)  

For both cities, 1993 was the dawn of gentrification.  Yeah, DC’s crime is still ridiculous, but now segregation is back in style, so things are cool.  It stays where it needs to be – as part of the ongoing extermination of black people.

I spent my summer of 93 in New York feeling like I’d just jumped off the back of the wagon and still had hay stuck in my hair.  It was a grand time, which I spent buying underground zines, rare videos, and porno.  Brittany O’Connell was one of my favorite girls, then.  She had launched onto the scene in 1992, and I think she’s still creeping around.  Except she’s gotten a boob job and is starting to look rough.  In the early 90’s, she was this adorable little redhead with a sort of inbred trailer trash face.  Lovely girl.  She and Chloe Nicole dominated my porn purchases at this sleazy little shop in the East Village where I knew the Pakistani owner well.  Every day I’d pop in, we’d talk a bit about nothing, then I’d poke around his maze of shelves.  Slave to Love jumped out one day and I rushed it back to watch before my friend got back from work and we entered our typical evening of avoidance while being no more than ten feet away from each other.

In my recent move, last Thanksgiving, I found the video – and all the others – crammed away in a crate.  The big fuck-off glossy porno box was gone, but the tape seemed okay.  I no longer own a VCR, so there was no way to watch my favorite scenes again.  One scene was chewed up, anyway.  Had been since 1997, when I lived in Bethesda with yet another twitchy roommate.  Our neighbor, in the big warren of apartments that I attempted to call home for a couple of years but which always felt transitional, was this beautiful, sexually liberated, late 30-something brunette.  She’d come to the door in her big robe and just visit and talk about how much she enjoyed anal sex and so on.  Well, eventually, as we grew closer, she got her hands on my porno collection and, being a fruitcake, wanted to borrow most of the tapes.  Slave to Love – with that alluring cover and the deep red videotape casing – drew her eye.  She borrowed it for about three weeks and, somehow, her machine mangled the scene where Sierra is first seduced.  Forever afterward, I was only able to watch the movie from the scene in the limo onwards, unless I wanted to have the tape unwind in the machine.  Or, as my friend in London will testify, unless I wanted the VCR to simply be ruined.  Somehow, that mangled scene destroyed his uber-expensive multi-standard VCR.

My old college TV and VCR travelled with me until 2005, when I moved out of my grandparent’s house.  Once on dominant display in the Bethesda apartment, they eventually ended up on the floor of the closet in the tight back bedroom that I took at the old folk’s place.  So, to watch any of the porno on tape, I’d have to open the closet door and bitterly masturbate to the fading screen of a 20 year old TV on the dusty floor of a solidly packed closet.  

During my big move, after my grandfather sold the family house for a paltry sum that, two years later, is exhausted by our family’s traditional excesses,  I left the TV and VCR behind for the cleaners.  I regard TV as my enemy – knowing that having one means lying on the couch for hours on end watching World’s Craziest Explosions or whatever.  I stored the porn away and that was that.

Of course, by then, I was downloading gigs of porn a day.  A whole new world opening up, really.  The quaint porn on the old video tapes I had bought in the late 80’s and early 90’s just didn’t do it anymore.  

Now that I have Slave to Love in a digital format, I feel somewhat in touch with my youth again.  Back to 1993.  I was 19 and full of life.  At least, I think I was.  To be honest, I’m having trouble remembering what I was like.  So I’ll just say I was happy and full of life, even though that’s not been true since I was eight.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I remember that 1993 sucked.  I’ve enjoyed so little of this pathetic life of mine – marked by family tragedy and death, physical pain and financial ruin, treacherous friends and failed dreams.  Just about every year since 1986 has sucked for one reason or another.  So thank god for Brittany O’Connell.  Where would I be without the beauty of a red headed anal queen cum dumpster?