Though he has drawn and redrawn the Lusty Lady for the series, he has never entered its doors. "I've never had the courage to go in alone," he says. Instead, he relied on descriptions from actresses he's known who have worked there. He wants to enter the place now, to visit "Slidehouse."
The Lusty Lady is surprisingly bright inside. A couple regular customers tell us the place is run by two lesbians who are exacting their revenge against men. Patrons walk into booths, feed quarters into a slot, and watch as a partition slides up to reveal a room filled with nude women grinding and gyrating to the piped-in dance music. Depending on the number of quarters someone feeds into the machine--thus extending the peep time--the women will often come right up to the glass separating them from the patrons, spreading their legs for a view a gynecologist could appreciate.
Behind the women is a wall covered in mirrors, which reflects the men in the other booths. Many of them are masturbating. Each booth has a box of Kleenex mounted on the wall.
Upon exiting the Lusty Lady after only a few minutes, Storey seems impressed with himself--that he could so accurately draw a place he had never actually visited. "I wasn't prepared for one thing, though," he says, pulling his jacket tighter against the wind. "I didn't expect the women to be so good-looking."
At home, Storey has three Assassinada dolls standing on his shelves, two of which were Catwoman dolls in another life, the other a former G.I. Joe. Storey had once envisioned a whole line of "Slidehouse" products, spin-offs from the sales of his sure-to-be-successful comic book. But no offers were forthcoming.
Stephen J. Cannell, the man responsible for "The A-Team" and "The Rockford Files," once expressed some interest in making a film of The Marat/Sade Journals; for a while, Storey says, he was so sure it was going to happen that he began considering who might play him.
"It could only be Tommy Lee Jones," Storey says. "He'd have to be me. And I had all these fantasies about Tommy Lee playing me in The Marat/Sade Journals. And I thought, 'Who's going to be the Kelly character?' That is a big one. But stuff like that goes through my mind all the time. I'd go off the deep end. I will work on something until I'm completely broke, with no chance of income from it, and then I get very, very ugly.
"My friend Marshall Arisman says if I don't do pictures I get mean. And I like that. Lots of things Marshall says are great. But it's true. I get really mean and ugly and nasty when these things fail to take off. The only thing that keeps me going is to note that all the artists that I admire have these same neuroses and doubts. Almost everyone who's been honest has doubted the work. It's uncontrolled in time. You're out there in space, and you don't know if you're ever gonna get back. Or whether it even matters.
