Hanging By Hooks

I read Joey Strange's tarot cards for him last week [seriously]. But I didn't foresee the release of Sky & Summer's Piercing Party Part 2 starring Joey which came out this week. Probably because I don't do video release schedules in my readings.

Put out by Spunky Spur Video, the video title tests the true definition of the word "party." Lead weights are suspended from Joey's penis head, a makeshift vice made of what look like chopsticks choke his balls, and, at one point, a series of six very unsightly suspension hooks are embedded in Joey's tattooed back. Bearing in mind, this is a guy who walks around in a permanent state with half-inch holes punched and grommeted in his earlones. Or, to put it more metaphysically, Joey's the living, breathing physical embodiment of the "hanged man" in the Tarot.

Joey was interviewed by Darklady this past weekend for her radio show in Oregon. Joey, who won an AVN specialty tape award last year for Strange Life: The Breech," said he was a bit tipsy when he did the show. He wasn't, however, when we talked to him several weeks ago and asked him, as befits natural curiosity, what on earth made him become a walking Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibit.

Joey: "I was working at VCX and I really wanted to shoot a film but didn't have the body for porn and didn't have an interest in fucking girls I didn't know on film. I just wanted to do something a little bit different. I saw some people hanging by hooks and I figured this is a market that hasn't been tapped yet. But it's all over the news, all the time. That's how it ended up."

Before Strange, who has a degree in philosophy, got into the adult industry, he sold office products "or whatever little shit job I could get." Strange says he's never been a normal-looking guy. "I've always been kind of like this," he says. "That's why I was working the shit jobs," he laughs.

Joey: "Initially I went to work for Jeff Stryker for awhile. I answered an ad in the paper for an office assistant. It ended up being Jeff Stryker. I didn't know who he was when I walked into the office. Boy, was that an introduction into the porn world. From there I contacted VCX, I forget exactly how, but I got in touch with Harry Young. I went in there and they hired me on the spot. It was kinda cool. I worked for them about a year-and-a-half and in that time I made Strange Life: The Breech, won the award on it."

G. Ross: "What do you think there was about it that captured peoples' attention? What was the... hook ?"

Joey: "Geez. I think it was basically the newness. Let's face it, everything in porn's been done. There's only so many times you can do the pizza guy before everybody gets a job at Domino's and waits for that. Anyway, shape, form or place you can fuck a woman has been done. It's just a different cast of characters. I think when something new comes out that isn't as derogatory as everything else, I guess it makes people look."

[Joey says he doesn't include sex in his vids. "That pigeonholes you too much just into the porn market," he says. "If you can go and straddle both, that increases your sales by at least half. Just on the morbidity count alone."]

Joey: "Strange Life was a conglommeration of people with good ideas. I called myself director for a title. Basically how it happened, my cameraman Dimitri knew what to do. He knew his shots. He didn't need me telling him. The rest of the people knew what they wanted to do. That works beautifully. I didn't call up a girl and say, 'Hey, can we sew your tits together?' This was something that was going on, anyway, so I brought a video camera." Joey says the girl's name is Dustin, a piercer from Texas.

Joey: "The second scene I did with Bud Cockerham [a for-real guy with a for-real name who's noted for taking parking pylons up his ass]. I got in touch with him through Tom of Finland. I called him up and said, 'Hey, I heard your a performance artist. I'd like to film you. What do you want to do?' He told me what his price was and I went down there."

[Bud, by the way, gets his eyes and mouth sewn shut in Strange Life]

Joey: "My scene came about because I really wanted to be on the tape. At that point I was seeing the raw footage and liked it so much, I wanted to be part of that, not just a name on the box." [Joey's mummified and gets eight piercings in the scalp and six sutures in the neck.]

Joey: "The final scene was the marionette which my friend Sean McManus had shot prior as a student project for his art school."

Joey describes it as a black & white scene that McManus did for the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. "Sean McManus is the guy who got me into all this," says Strange. "He was the person who introduced me to everybody else who's hanging by hooks. It's a small community right now. The hook community. But he introduced me to it and showed me this film and that's where I got the idea. You'll see a lot of inspiration in that film in what I'm doing now. It was shot documentary, not as a freak show project, but this is what we do but we're not out killing babies. That was my introduction into the piercing scene, and Sean McManus is a friend of mine to this day. I try to perform with him as often as possible."

The next obvious question to Joey was how long does it take him to recuperate. "If it's like facial piercings and the light stuff, I figure maybe four days, five days before the bruises start going away," he says. "When I'm doing a suspension it takes me a week before I'm healed up fine, and two weeks before I can do it again."

G. Ross: "Whatever possessed you to do shit like this?"

Joey: "I read a book called The Body Obsolete. It really made an impact on me. My understanding now is that the body's just a vessel for the mind and the soul. The mind controls the body; the body doesn't control the mind. And it's got another meaning for me, personally. A lot of people look at me and see the tattoos and the piercings and they don't realize I do have a college education and consider myself fairly intelligent. It's kind of like, here's the body. This is what it's doing. If that's all you're looking at, then that's all you're going to get from me."

G. Ross: "So what happened to the college education?"

Joey [laughs]: "A college education in philosophy doesn't get you very far."

G. Ross: "C'mon. Van Nuys? Philosophers? This is philosopher country."

Joey: "Yeah, smoke crack, sit at the bus stop and discuss Taoism."

Joey's been working on another project called Suspension: The Ultimate Body Experience. "It's another spinoff of Strange Life: The Breech, except with more intense piercings," he says, "whereas, Strange Life was mostly like performance piercings, just needles. Suspension is more suspension-driven. The first scene is Marina Vain. We put ten gauge rings into her stomach and laced it shut, then put some needles in her arms and hung some lemons from them. Imagine that."

[Strange says a lot was going on his life at the time he was shooting this feature. His brother had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train in Pasadena. "It just so happened his funeral was on the day I was scheduled to shoot," he notes. "With so much put together and so much money expended on it, I couldn't all it off. I had a Finnish TV crew there. I had a couple of magazines there. I couldn't back out. I was forced to perform and then go to my brother's funeral. Not only was it my first suspension ever, it was the first time I ever hung by hooks - I was hanging in a Christ state, in a crucifix position with needles poking in my forehead as a crown of thorns and a cheek skewered just for giggles.

"That was real intersting for me," he continued. "Not only was I dealing with hanging by hooks for the first time, but I went to a funeral still bleeding from the back, looking at my brother's remains sitting under a big crucifix of Christ. Then I had to make it back in time to do the last scene." [And, yes, glad you asked, Strange sees a religious significance in the stuff he's doing.]

"With my philosophy background, I also kind of studied theology for fun," he says. "Everything I do has religious overtones in it, that's because I don't like organized religion. They're a bunch of hypocrites. There's so much involved in religions that I consider bad and not conducive to social well-being, so, yes, I will fuck with religion on a regular basis."

Joey: "I also like the interview process in these features because it tells you where these people are coming from and who they are, and what they do for a living. I think everybody kind of finds that interesting. If you look at a freak on the street you wonder how the hell they're supporting themselves because you sure as hell wouldn't hire them. It just shows that we're real people who may do strange things. We go home, cook dinner, sit in front of the TV just like everybody else."

G. Ross: "Except around eight o'clock, instead of turning on the Turner Channel, you poke your eyeballs out."