She Did It Her Way
How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle?
Last Thursday, I went to an estate sale at Parlour Estates in Hollywood of vintage adult movie posters and other vintage erotic ephemera. I had been to Parlour Estates before for another estate sale some months ago, but this one was more up my alley. Parlour Estates is owned by the same guys who own the record store around the corner: The Record Parlour. According to the listing for the three-day estate sale (now over, sorry), there were over 700 pieces of “Sex & Drug Exploitation Ads, Pin-Up, Nudes, XXX Adult Movie Posters, Promo packs, etc.” I bought a poster (you can see it in the photo above) for an X-rated 1978 movie called “She Did It Her Way.” I wanted to ask the guy running it what the deal was as I gave him my money. Who had collected all this stuff? But he was on the phone. So I left.
Today I noticed that a Record Parlour Instagram post about the estate sale mentioned Howie Pyro. Pyro played the bass, including for Danzig for a time. According to Wikipedia: he “was also friends with Sid Vicious and was one of the last people to see the former Sex Pistols bassist alive; Pyro was there the night he died from a heroin overdose.” After Pyro died from, also per Wikipedia, “COVID-19-related pneumonia after suffering from liver disease,” in May of last year, The Village Voice annointed him a “Patron Saint of Weird.” According to Pyro’s Instagram profile, I noticed, he was, among other things, a “collector exxxtreme.” I wondered if the person who had so painstakingly collected all that smut for so many years was Pyro.
I sent an email to the guy at the estate sale to confirm this theory, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. I’ll update this newsletter if I do. The poster I got is terrific. It has the little marks where tape had been used to hang it on the wall of some adult theater many years ago, a sign of a bygone era of which I now have a piece.
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