hugh fox interview

write this

emmer effer

some days are better than none

writeThis.com, pretendgenius.com and author.

'chi chi' the screaming went. 'write this wants you to find hugh fox and interview him'. nonny toocomplete is handing me the phone with the kind of sway that can only suggest she is eager to advance my career. they had already hung up on the other end but i knew that if they had come to me it was because the aliens had crashed while trying to land. hugh fox, eh? the hugh fox bibliography alone is 108 microsoft word pages in helvetica 12. he shouldn't be too hard to find. but he wasn't at home so i quit. write this called back and told me i was on a deadline. i didn't know what to do so i went to utah and asked around. it was iktomi who put me onto fox originally. not iktomi himself but one of his agents. i could tell by the point of his bangs from the temples inward as an arrow pointing at his nose. south. so south i went.

i was sitting along the side of the road in Veracruz-Llave having lunch and noticed an old woman. i call her old but she wasn't that old. i'm frankly not sure how old she was but my first impression was that she was an old woman. and she was walking toward me from about a half block away. now, i don't want to be accused of overdramatizing so i'll just say that as she got nearer i imagined her reaching out with a large hypodermic needle in order to inject her fluids right into the frontal lobe of my brain but she was behind me and as she passed she brushed (though it could have been something else) against my back and said, "Huge Fox". yes i said. where is he? i got laughter. "why?" she finally said. "haven't you seen him?" i don't know. i assume he's living underground or maybe he's the living underground. "drink this" she said. really? it's that simple? i drank it fast. as far as i could tell some men appeared and i was lying prostrate on a cart that was being rolled down the street. the next thing i know after much spinning up then down a funnel i am face to face with Tlazolteotl

except the face emerging from her vagina is the face of anais nin and it speaks to me. 'chaven de huantar' the face vagina says. 'do you have many dinero?' no. i don't. 'aaaaaa' she screams 'aaaaaa am sick of plumbing. get out! get away!' i was suddenly alone lying prostrate on a cart in a back alley but i knew where to find hugh fox.

i continued on until i was in what is now called peru. but hugh fox wasn't in peru. i found him at chavin de huantar some 2500 years ago. a little rain had fallen and Fox had come back to life. this time in the guise of a good looking young man and looking for a wife. he wasn't thrilled to see me. he attacked me with a rock. fortunately that was the only technology available to him and i was able to parry long enough to pull him back to 2009 and effect this interview.

in less cryptic east lansing, michigan, father fox is reflecting on his life. the professor life. not the chavin life of the stone carver of so called artifacts - one of which he unknowingly bought from some 20th century dealer - purchasing his own product - as we all do, i suppose, as supposing does, it also leads us to leaving these words as a record. now we have stone, flesh, and language, and a tale that swallows itself.

Write This: Mr. Fox. Most of us here (and our contributors) at Write This would whore ourselves in any manner possible to be included in a Pushcart Prize book. That is not to say we have gone through as much trouble as we have to track you down for such small matters. Can you give us the key to the universe or at least the key to the Pushcart Prize's washroom?

Hugh Fox: Let's forget about the Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize and most other lit press stuff 40 years back was involved with COSMEP. COSMEP is the key-key-key. Len Fulton in 1968 created a small-press/lit-press get-together in Berkeley. Fulton is editor of the Small Press Review, one of the key mags in the whole scene....you find it everywhere...should say FOUND...because now it's on the Internet. But it was in every library in the U.S.

Write This: We should know our history.

Hugh Fox: And I was on a committee that became the founders of COSMEP. The Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers. So I was a founder of COSMEP. And all the mags and poets joined, we had annual conventions in NY or St.Paul-Minneapolis, San Francisco...you name it.

Write This: Um... Barstow?

Hugh Fox: No.

Write This: Amory, Mississippi?

Hugh Fox: So I met ALL the major poets... Doug Blazek, Richard Krech, Charles Potts, William Wantling (Charles Bukowski on Wantling), A.D. Winans, Duane Locke, D.A. Levy (More), Dick Higgins, Charles Plymell, H.L. Van Brunt, John Bennett, Robert Bly, Sam Cornish, Lyn Lifshin...

Write This: I wonder if our readers are familiar with those people. Our readers do, I predict, know who Lady Gaga is. How else can you fill us in?

Hugh Fox: I did a book called The Living Underground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Also, when I was in L.A. for ten years (teaching at Loyola, now Loyola-Marymount) I had met Bukowski and did a book about him [editors note - the first academic study of Bukowski], also another book about Lyn Lifshin. I was the best pal of Richard Morris, an astrophysicist turned poet, who "ran" COSMEP for most of its life. You know, all the business end of things. Also a great poet.

Write This: Can I stop you for a moment?

Hugh Fox: Yes?

Write This: On Bukowski. What I understand is Bukowski's real name was Fitzkennedy Lawrence and you met him at a party on his yacht. Lawrence at that time was a young over-educated or mal-educated romantic trying to impersonate Shelley. It took a little convincing but over time you and some of your compadres convinced him the way to go as a sincere poet was to change his name and put him in a more relatable to the masses environment. I don't really have a question here but you can respond as you see fit.

Hugh Fox: Bukowski was Bukowski...Polish name...born in Andermach,Germany, father a G.I., mother a German...and he was really very intensely "foreign," a maniac when it came to writing.

Write This: I know you said forget about the Pushcart Prize but I recently had a strange experience related to Anais Nin and Anais Nin was also a founding editor for the Pushcart Prize and that's all the connection we need. Did you ever have sex with her? I mean she had sex with everyone else.

Hugh Fox: <raised eyebrow>

Write This: How about Gore Vidal? Have you ever had sex with Gore Vidal?

Hugh Fox: I've been married three times and the only woman outside of marriage I had sex with was a librarian at Loyola University. I also had another personality, Connie Fox. Connie has her own published books. But never anything homosexual. Just cross-dressing. So forget Anais Nin and Gore Vidal.

Write This: I don't think I can. I'm sorry.

Hugh Fox: <appears to look over our shoulder into the distance>

Write This: We'll get back to this Connie Fox person later. Who was your best pal in the world?

Hugh Fox: My best pal in the world was Harry Smith from Brooklyn Heights. I'd visit him three or four times a year for a week or two each visit. Had my own room in the basement. And would work for him in his office next to City Hall in Manhattan. He had a magazine called The Smith which eventually became Pulpsmith.

Write This: Did he ever have sex with Anais Nin?

Hugh Fox: All of my literary contacts, etc. are in my book Way, Way Off the Road. Published by Ibbetson Street Press. Still available. I've got another unpublished book called The Confessions all about Hugh and Connie and Lucia (first wife), Nona (second wife) and Bernadete (third wife). Six kids... Another unpublished book called What Do You Do On Sundays? all about my being raised as a strict Irish Catholic in Chicago, totally immersed in Catholicism...then finding out my grandmother (mother's mother) was a Jew and becoming Jewish...although I'm still mainly agnostic.

Write This: So if you've written a book called The Confessions that means you'll review a Pretend Genius book called mean confession. Right?

Hugh Fox: If you insist. I'm 77, the same age as Ted Kennedy. You could ask me something about my religion... Something like "So what religion are you? What do you really BELIEVE?"

Write This: Okay.

Hugh Fox: "I was raised as an Irish Catholic in Chicago. Super Irish...all the nuns in grammar school from Ireland...at least 85% of them. And then the Christian Brothers of Ireland in high school. All that brogue, and the Irish worldview, THE FLESH IS EVIL, WE'RE ONLY HERE FOR SALVATION AND DEATH AND FOREVERNESS IN HEAVEN WITH JESUS AND THE TRINITY AND THE VIRGIN MARY AND THE REST OF THE SAINTS..then I went to Loyola University in Chicago...pre-Med...then a switch to English and on my mother's death-bed she made a confession that her mother was a Jew, so I became Jewish too and that changed my life a LOT."

Write This: Can you stop shouting please? What is the difference between dying as a Jew and dying as a Christian?

Hugh Fox: OK, my friend, here are some answers. A huge difference. I remember years ago my favorite Cantor, Bruce Wetzler, saying "Jews kind of believe in an afterlife, but it's very vague...no real knowledge about it...what it's like..." The Christians have made it a lot more specific. Huge amounts of material written about heaven, about constant contact with the Trinity, an eternity of perfect happiness, a state of constant, not sexual, but existential ecstasy. And tons of creative writing about it too...like Dante... You die, you leave your body behind, and you ascend into heaven for an eternity of the kind of extent of JOY that you have never experienced on earth. Forever and forever and forever with Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the Holy Spirit and God the Father.

Write This: We'll have to come down on the side of the Jews on this one. Mary and Joseph probably aren't very interesting. Jesus will be a little too intense. Where do you get away in heaven? On the other hand, projecting your wishes into an after-life fulfillment has a certain appeal. Only why spend it with a carpenter and his wife? Do you think there is any validity in the hope, or exercise, of willing your afterlife into the image of your own?

Hugh Fox: First of all, I personally don't believe there IS an afterlife. I don't believe a word about heaven, infinite survival, or hell or purgatory...or any of it. I also don't believe there is a God out there who created anything. I see the universe as godless...and see all religions/mythologies as pure invention. If there was a God what happened to him NOW? How come he was always talking to Moses, etc., and the Holocaust happened...or there's no intervention into the wars, street crime, so-called sins... Nothing could be more absent than the God of world-myths/religions. At the same time I always ask myself "How could the universe with it's 80 billion galaxies begin by itself. Where did all the mater come from, all the stars and planets...everything has to begin, nothing is eternal, but where did the whole thing come from, how could it have ever begun? No sex in heaven. Just graveyards or cremation and my dust thrown out from a plane over the San Francisco bay...

Write This: Then explain one last time to your inquisitors why you spent all those years investigating ancient Gods?

Hugh Fox: Well, being raised as a fanatic Catholic, reading the Fathers of the Church, going to daily Mass for decades, immersed in writers like Aquinus, St. Augustine,Tertullian, St. Peter of Alexandria, Methodius, Chrysostom, etc. while everyone else was out at baseball, football and basketball games...it was fascinating for me to discover that, for example, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, was a New World version of Hercules, and that all the "adventures" in his life, depended on the sequence of the zodiac...in a sense it all confirmed the idea that Christianity was all invented, that Christ, born at the time of the rebirth of the sun in the year, was another version of the Sun-God...in fact you could write a whole book comparing Quetzalcoatl, Hercules and Jesus...My interest in the pre-Columbian/ancient myth was merely a continuation/extension of my interest in basic Christianity.

Write This: Hasn't worrying about whether there are Gods or not been the wrong question all along? It seems to be a way of wondering where (so to speak) consciousness comes from. What is the nature of consciousness? Is it accidental?

Hugh Fox: It seems normal to wonder where beef comes from, or milk or starlight or books...cause and effect...we reach back from the Effects to the Causes. Normal. In terms of ultimate explanations...there are none. The Universe is logically impossible. Nothing could have always existed, everything has to begin, but if there was nothing in the beginning, how did nothing become something and then become everything? And the same goes for God? How did God begin? And how did anyone create everything from nothing? We live in an impossible reality...impossible...but there it is...

Write This: Why go to a synagogue? A connection to ceremony?

Hugh Fox: Well, I miss a sense of the old Irish-Italiano Catholic sense of TRIBALNESS that I had in Chicago and I don't think I could find in the Catholic world around here. And I love the ONEG (party) after services. All kinds of pals I've made, one 92 year old retired Colonel (Martin Saper) whose son owns the local art gallery, lots of retired professors and their wives...pals,pals, pals...it's about an hour of social-time/talk-time every week. No more "clubs" around like COSMEP, and the local poetry group gets together only once every few months, and I'm not teaching any more so I miss the secretaries and other profs and students... that's why I love going to Brazil (Santa Catarina) with my wife and being with her immense family as often as possible...contact, contact, contact...

Write This: These are subtle lessons, aren't they? What have you written that you regret?

Hugh Fox: I'm not sorry about anything I wrote. I just wish I'd stayed a little crazier...I began very academically, then got involved with the Beats/Hippies and went wild on paper, and then in my older age got more academic again...although my novels like In The Beginning would be great films, preferably made in England. I'd also like to see my plays on stage all over the place, and on DVD. Why don't you ask me something like What is your favorite book that you wrote? "In The Beginning, a novel about one of my students --Pat Leahy -- out at Loyola University in Los Angeles. We never had sex, but managed everything else. The novel is about us breaking up when we're young and then meeting again in Paris when we're old, old, old...we get married and I die...sad novel, but a real love-story that would make a great film. If only I could find an agent, publisher, film-maker...that's the big problem these days, everything on internet, cyber-obsessiveness...and junk everything...the 'classic' has isappeared, everything aimed at the largest idiot audience possible..."

Write This: Don't mention it. Will you give us money?

Hugh Fox: Let's imagine I won the lottery and had 300 million dollars. I would buy a bunch of houses in West Hollywood close to Angela Mankiewicz or in Carpinteria, California, close to Santa Barbara (and Glenna Luschei)... and give twenty million each to 1. My daughter Margaret and her two kids and husband (who live in Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2. My daughter Alexandra, her daughter and husband (who live in Ann Arbor, Michigan), 3, My daughter Marcella, her daughter and husband (who live in Ann Arbor), 4. My son, Christopher, who lives with me in East Lansing, Michigan, 5. Nona Fox, my second wife, who lives in East Lansing and who I support in a house five blocks away...and they would get the money if they "retired" and moved close to me in California. Then I would spend California winters in Brazil...which is summer in Brazil..in Florianopolis, is an apartment close to my brother- and sister-in-laws, Flavio and Nazare...right next to the beach. So it would be summer all year long and I'd be with my people and my wife's people, half a year each...maybe more back and forths...I'd also like to spend time every year with Richard Krech in Berkeley, Charles Potts in Yakima, A.D. Winans in San Francisco, Lynn Strongin in British Columbia Harry Smith in Maine, and the Burgesses in Ohio (Kathleen is one of the greatest poets around and there is a great deal of empathy between us, on the edge of love).

Write This: For some reason I am thinking about Thanksgiving. Are you holiday oriented? What is your favorite holiday?

Hugh Fox: Not very holiday-oriented at all. My main orientation is toward concerts at the MSU Music department, the Lansing Symphony concerts...just got back from a Shakespeare-soaking in Stradford in Canada...and from Chicago...the Chicago Symphony and The Man Who Was Thursday, a novel by GK Chesterton, turned into a play and performed at the New Leaf Theatre in Lincoln Park (Lincoln Park Cultural enter). My favorite holiday is Christmas when Christ, the Sun-God, is reborn and the New Year begins, light begins to lengthen every day.

Write This: Happy Thanksgiving. If Bukowski after an evening of bathtub gin and sardines had suggested a threesome with you and Anais Nin (assuming you were all together in one room discussing the drapes and also assuming Anais Nin was about 29) would you have gone for it?

Hugh Fox: On my second or third visit to his place he did suggest that he wanted to have sex with my wife, Lucia. Original name -- Lucia Ungaro. Married name : Lucia Ungaro de Fox. Check her out as Lucia Ungaro. She was a good-looking piece of ass in those days. I always dressed her in high heels and black pantyhose and tight black dresses...long black hair...part Hungarian, mostly Indian from Peru. I just left , told Buk "No thanks, and took off."

Write This: You have written, what, ten million things? What is your latest novel?

Hugh Fox: My latest novel is The Depths and the Dragons. Here is a synopsis:

An Israeli woman’s husband is killed by terrorists while buying Pizza in Tel Aviv, she moves to Paris with her two kids, gets a job teaching Hebrew in a synagogue in Enghein, just outside Paris, the Rabbi falls in love with her, she has an affair with him, she gets interested in Catholicism, converts...and during her baptism, a terrorist bomb kills her two sons (she’s on the altar, they are in the back) and she leaves Paris, moves to southern France just to get away from it all, bury herself in her despair. She goes to Toulouse, then to Montsegur, where five hundred years ago a horde of Cathars/Albigensians were burned alive by the Catholics. She finds out that there are still surviving Cathar/Albigensian groups in the Montsegur region and she joins them. Their view of the world makes sense to her -- that the flesh is evil, created by a second evil God, and that only the spirit is good, created by a good God. Total dualism. At the very end, though, she wakes up one morning and it’s a particularly beautiful sunrise and the words of Psalm 148 flood into her mind, in Hebrew:

Praise ye the Lord...all his angels....

Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and all deeps...

And suddenly she’s a Jew again. This may be my last novel, although.... I am now writing a short story about the Rabbi in our synagogue, part of a super-liberal Jewish-Feminist movement to neutralize God sexually. Not God the Father, but God the Neuter.So far only three pages written. [Here they are]:

GOD

“Well, you can’t see God, the creator of the universe, as some guy with testicles and other male sexual equipment. How can the creator of eighty million galaxies be seen as Joe Blow in the Snow, some kind of androgyne-animated Macho Snort....”Still cute-ish at fifty, but maybe she could have worn longer skirts and less fancy-wancy jazz-heeled shoes, maybe some sort of rabbinical robes/costume to enable her to role-play more convinctingly. The perfect flushed-up hair and makeup. Something more earthern, primitive, desertish, Israelyish, not a veil or anything, not necessarily that far, but something that said LEAH, SARAH, RIVKA, THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST.

A hand up from The Faithful.

Professor Sam Corngold, Harvard Professor of Biblical Studies, 76 now, retired for twelve years, heart surgeries, radical weight losses, diet-changes, blind in one eye, but like he always said “All you need is one hand to carry a stab-the-enemy sword!”

Totally against the Schul/Synagogue rules. You never dared dialogue with the Representative of the Divine...with all the Torah answers up her Chinoise sun-flowered semi-transparent sleeves.

“It’s kind of against the RULES....,but OK, Sam....”

“But Moses was talking to God all the time...and Adonai is male....all the original Hebrew is male...this radical feminism of yours....”

“The ancients were the ancients. I can’t see myself wandering around all day wearing a veil, being one of three wives.....”

“No wives. You were married once, right?”

Rabbi Shortfall suddenly getting very rabbinical,raising her carefully manicured hands, palms up to the heavens /roof.

“Please rise for Kaddish,” mentioning the latest dead, the dead whose death-anniversaries (jahrzeits) were in the weekly bulletin, moving solemnly into the Aramaic, the only time in the whole service when another ancient language was used, when Kaddish was finished Corngold still standing as everyone else sat down.

“You forgot to give Larry Berry his say!”

The Rabbi’s face fixed, frozen, solid, almost as if she herself were lying dead in a casket, Dr. Berry, the President of the Congregation getting up and giving his usual thanks to the Rabbi, the Cantor, the congregation-members who were furnishing the food for the after-services snack-talk time (the Oneg), mentioning the six o’clock outdoors feast-time next week before services, an attempt to add a little zip and jazz to the usual heavyness of the services.

Then, when he was finished, the Rabbi announcing “We will end services with Shalom, on page three hundred and fifty-two, words by Dr. Bergmeister, music by Hannah Middleman, our pianist-in-residence...,” giving Hannah a pumpkin-ghost wide smile.

Hannah on the piano smiling, Maurey Bergmeister getting up, turning around, smiling, a retired professor of Computer Science who also is (oddly) a specialist in African languages.

Hannah begins playing. A tiny woman with huge talents, married to Sam Bergman, a retired professor from Boston University, Mr. Shakespeare, Renaissance theatre, always spelled with an “re” instead of “er,” who smiles happily to see his focused on so adroitly, thinking “Women focusing on women. All within the new feminism....

Bergmeister up on the bima now. Him on the right, Cantor Myrtle Langsheim on the left, almost looking like a couple, although Cantor Langsheim was getting oldish looking in spite of the thick layers of makeup she used on her face, her diets, her surgeries, hair dyes. Always used to be Cantor Solemnity before Rabbi Shortfall took over, but since Shortfall took over getting kind of age eight-ish, everything getting kiddie oriented, like Shortfall always said “We’re Mom-Figures, after all, and so many Jews are drifting out of Judiaism into Cyberneticism, as if the Computor were God.”

The cantor starting out, lifting up her arms and then crossing them back and forth as she began:

BING, BANG, AND A BIG BOOM

Write This: With a big bang boom topic change here, your work on the common creation myths shared by ancient cultures on separate continents appears to have preceded Joseph Campbell's celebrity with this theme in the '80s. Did you ever want to send him a bill?

Hugh Fox: I was familiar with Campbell's books, but you've got to take a look at books like my Home of the Gods. Michigan State U.library was CRAZY with the number of wierd, old history books they had...books and mags... I found old mags about pre-Greek culture that related the word TIANAKU/TIWANAKU with the rising of the sun...and I'd already related Tiawanaku, Bolivia to the CENTER of all ancient world sun-worship.

Write This: So we were wondering about Anais... no? Here's the problem,. You represent a rich history - a content - that is entirely inaccessible to the fingertips at home. It is missing from the internet literature canon. When we do a search on Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry it brings up very little and none of the content. The closest we get are a couple University archive guides. This is an intolerable situation. Can't you make someone transcribe all this for the internet?

Hugh Fox: Wouldn't be a bad idea for the internet.....but it's in all the major library archives including the NY Public Library, etc. etc. etc. For me it's kind of ancient history now.

Write This: We're taking this harder than you are. Designate someone for this task, please.

You might be identified with the sixties [editors note - We don't know about this - our interviewer lifted this question from The Strunk and Fungible Guide to Interviewing]. We were at one of those poetry slam deals where the 'potes' had to respond extemporaneously on various topics. One particularly witty hipster/non hipster who had probably been the cleverest competitor was given the topic "The Sixties". A sort of anticipatory hush came over the crowd as though this was a numinous almost indelible moment and how could anyone possibly pull this off? The potentate paused on the note crooner style (only in silence) then said "..sixty... sixty one... sixty two... sixty three... sixty four... sixty five... sixty six... sixty seven... sixty eight... sixty nine." Then we all laughed and celebrated and carried him out of the room on our shoulders. But we know that you have some ink left in the sixties that you carry around on a rock. We should like now to come to you for some reflection with distance from the sixties.

Hugh Fox: The Sixties were all LIVE IT IN THE NOW philosophy. Very Buddhistic. Charles Potts, Richard Krech, Richard Morris...for me a lot of it centered around COSMEP and our get-togethers with all the poets and publishers. You ought to get a copy of my book Way, Way Off The Road. From Somerville Press in Somerville, MA. That gives you pretty much the whole picture.

Write This: Thems some good advice. We would like to come back to this menage à interruptus with Sir Bukowski. We're not sure that answered our question precisely unless you were saying you would never have had a three way with Buk under any circumstances short of a confirmation of your biggest existential predicaments. Then that would answer my question. Would you care to revise your original answer?

Hugh Fox: The only three way I ever had was with Wife # 2 (Nona) and Wife #3 (Bernadete) and myself in the person of Connie...my other self...Connie is long dead now...but very active 30 years ago.

Write This: Have you ever danced a jig?

Hugh Fox: I've danced everything...especially in the old days 60 years ago...Irisher...

Write This: How has poetry changed over the years?

Hugh Fox: Well! It has changed a lot. Now we're like into like a post modern experimental phase like most modern painting. Like the work of Lynn Strongin a friend of mine. You don't tell it is as it is - Bukowski - but you tell it as it isn't...

Write This: Introduce us to Lynn Strongin.

Hugh Fox: Lynn Strongin is a Jew from the U.S. who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Crippled with polio since she was a kid. To me she is the single greatest poet on the scene today. Totally original. Unexpected. No idea of what's coming next. Difficult...but post-everything....no one else like her around...you ought to take a look at some of her work!

Write This: Do you think she would agree to an interview with us?

Hugh Fox: I think Lynn Strongin would agree to an interview.

Write This: Do you know who Lady Gaga is?

Hugh Fox: Of course I know who Lady Gaga is...one of my favorite leg-twiners...I just wish she could stay 23 for the next 100 years...I miss all the Sex Incarnates in my life, like Blythe Ayne, Lynne Savitt, Audrey Hepburn, Kim Novack, Glenna Luschei...

Write This: Tell us about Connie.

Hugh Fox: Well, I was raised as a girl. I was an only child and my mother really wanted a girl...didn't like men...was SUPER FEMINIST...and so I was pushed into ballet, opera, art, violin...taken around to stores and shown all the different fabrics and dresses and shoes, underwear...bras...the whole schmear. The picture was WOMEN ENJOY THEIR BODIES, MEN ENJOY THEIR DING-DONGS AND NOT THE REST OF THEIR BODIES...So when I moved to L.A. and started discovering trans-sexuals like Cochinelle...I started buying female clothes, experimenting around...and later, during the COSMEP days, I would go around in NY and San Francisco as Connie...Connie even has her own bibliography. I'd do Connie every night, even went around during the day with pantyhose on under my pants...when I married my second wife and we started a menage a trois with Bernadete (my third wife), we'd all dress up as whores with black tights and bras with the nipples cut open, lots of makeup....lots of hair...lots of time fucking around with the three of us together. One whole novel about that -- The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber. No money. Loyola Librarian -- the sexiest sex-maniac in Los Angeles, highest possible heels, shortest possible skirts..never put it in her but didn't have to, we'd have sex in her office, my office, on the beach, in either of our cars, in a washroom in a bar...in an alley...lots written about her...

The only other woman in my life I really was in love with was (is) Glenna Luschei. She's a widow now...and even in her 70's is still a PIECE...she visited here for a few days last month...I usually visit her in California every year...check her out.

Write This: We will. What are we leaving out?

Hugh Fox: I never had sex with Anais Nin. In fact, being a fanatic Irish Catholic, raised by Irish nuns and Irish Christian brothers, Mass every morning for decades...sex was bad news. And when I reached puberty my M.D. father bought me a book called Sex Talks to Boys, all about venereal disease. And that's all I heard from my parents, syphillis and gonnorhea.