LOS ANGELES—Jef Hickey, whose ties to the adult industry included serving as editor of rock-meets-porn publication New Rave magazine, creating the similarly-themed video series Backstage Sluts with director Matt Zane, and being briefly married to AVN Hall of Famer Tyffany Million, died April 18 due to an accidental overdose of heroin and morphine, according to the County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner. He was 56.
Renowned as a gifted and colorful writer, Hickey also did stints as a publicist for Notorious Productions, Zane Entertrainment and Kick Ass Pictures, as well as some freelance writing for AVN. But rock n' roll was always his first love, and before taking to any sort of professional writing, he traveled the world as a roadie for Megadeth.
As detailed in a 2004 profile by LA Weekly, Hickey would later use his connections with rock stars to get his foot in the door at Zane, where he and namesake owner Matt would launch the documentary-style series Backstage Sluts, a concept Hickey had first hatched at Notorious in 1996 with the late Toby Dammit, who had worked under him at New Rave. In that one-off precursor, titled Crew Sluts, Hickey performed his first and only sex scene, an oral session opposite Sophia Rio.
Backstage Sluts would become a bona fide smash hit, thanks in no small part to offering interview segments with the likes of Korn's Jonathan Davis, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, Motorhead's Lemmy and Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath, among others. The series garnered coverage from both Rolling Stone and VH1, and AVN's AAAA review of the inaugural installment called it "a breathtaking look within the music industry."
"If you only assumed what Jef was all about from his outward appearance and struggle with addictions, you'd most likely think he was just another strung out junkie. The truth is he was one of the most intelligent people I had ever worked with," Zane told AVN of his Backstage Sluts co-director. "He would constantly surprise me with his writing talent and overall intellect.
"His life turned out to be a bit short but he packed four lifetimes into those years," Zane continued. "His stories were unparalleled and lived experience was beyond excessively entertaining. I just wish he could have finished his book, because his story is legendary."
The book Zane spoke of was an autobiography that was lost when the laptop upon which it had been stored went missing, never to be recovered.
Hickey's one-time wife Million, who was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame this January, recounted the tale: "A number of years ago when I was living in Arizona, Jef was trying to put together his autobiograhy, and you know, he has quite a life story," Million told AVN. "Between all of his time in the rock and roll world as a roadie and all of his time in the porn world—I mean, he has some amazing stories and he's such a great writer. And he didn't have a computer to do his work on. So I went to Walmart and bought him a laptop and shipped it to him. It must have been around 2015 to 2017, somewhere around there.
"And I think the laptop got stolen or lost or something, and he was really despondent because everything—all of his work that he had put into [it], all of that time into his autobiography, many, many, many hours—was stored on that laptop and it was all gone," she recalled. "He was just despondent out of his mind about it. I said, 'What are you going to do? Are you going to try to rewrite it?' He said, 'Nah ... I'm just going to let it go. It's just too much. I just couldn't do it all over again.' But I know he was really upset about that. Really, really upset. And it's really too bad, because it would have made a great story."
Despite the initial fallout from the harsh ending of their whirlwind marriage (most unforgettably, as Million recollects, when Hickey sent back the divorce papers she'd served him—on Valentine's Day, no less—they arrived "sealed in a plastic bag and he [had] shit on them"), she remained friends with him until the end.
"After we split up, he had some not-so-nice things to say," she laughed. "But Jef was a very brilliant writer and a very creative person and very good friend. ... A lot of people don't know that in—it must have been around 1997 or 1998—I personally got Jef off of heroin. Jef called me and was desperate to get off of heroin, and I said, 'Come and stay at my place and I will take care of you.' So, he came and slept on my sofa, and in order to taper him off of the heroin, I had a bunch of painkillers saved up from some surgery that I had, so I was giving him painkillers to make it as painless as possible for him.
"It was the first time that he was on heroin," she noted. "I know that he got back on it later, but that was the first time he was ever on heroin. And he was surprised that I would help him, because it was shortly after we had split up, and he was not so nice to me after we split up. But yeah, I got him off of heroin and he was very grateful for that. And then we stayed friends after that because I think he didn't have anybody else to help him. He had burned many bridges. And he actually expressed to me, 'I'm really shocked that you were there for me.'"
But in spite of his "wild, crazy, irreverent, in your face" exterior, she confided, "at his core, he had a very caring and kind and gentle heart."
Another longtime acquaintance of Hickey's, Kick Ass Pictures founder and AVN Hall of Fame – Founders Branch member Mark Kulkis, echoed many of the above sentiments about him.
"I was introduced to Jef Hickey almost 30 years ago, while working as managing editor at AVN," Kulkis said. "He was one of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic writers I’d ever met. He wrote in breathless, run-on sentences that tended to throw punctuation under the bus. Despite this, or maybe because of it, his writing was exhilarating to read, a roller coaster of hilarity. My boss Gene Ross felt likewise, so Jef could pretty much pick his own writing assignments. That those ended up being few and far between was because, well, Jef’s sobriety was usually few and far between. Plus there was the fact that he often had a side job as a world-renowned roadie."
This roughly coincided with Hickey's tenure as editor-in-chief at New Rave magazine, "though neither the gig nor the magazine lasted long," as Kulkis recalls. "My favorite Hickey story from that era," he imparted, "was when performer Lana Sands stayed with him for a while at his apartment in New York City. One day she put on a pair of roller skates and told Jef she was going out to get Taco Bell. He asked her to bring him back some. Like a real life Rollergirl, Lana somehow ended up getting picked up by a guy in a limo or some such story. The upshot being, she went M.I.A. for a while. When she finally strolled back into his apartment a full week later, the first words out of Jef’s mouth were: 'So? Where’s my Taco Bell?'
"That’s pretty much how Jef lived his life, casually accepting whatever bizarre adventures came his way, never pausing to question or plan too much. Like the time he served a stint in federal prison for Fed-Ex’ing drugs to a stripper. 'Really?' I remember asking him. 'Fed-Ex?!' He just shrugged. 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'"
Kulkis continued, "I hired him as my PR guy at Kick Ass for a time. He talked the way he wrote, and his manic charm managed to get me and Mary Carey booked on The Daily Show after our dinner with George W. Bush. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough events like that to keep him busy, so the position was relatively short-lived.
"The one thing that always floored me about Jef was that even with his stringy hair, junkie complexion, mumbled diction, and perennially broke, he retained an inexplicable appeal to the fairer sex. I remember at one point he was dating a legit actress, a beautiful young blonde. I don’t recall her name, nor would I want to tar and feather her with the recollection, but she had a decent part on an actual network TV show. She was devoted to Jef despite the fact that, at this particular juncture in his life, he was carting around a colostomy bag due to some harrowing intestinal problem.
“'I don’t really know how I feel about her,' I recall him musing one day. 'Grateful,' I informed him, 'that’s how you should feel.'
"'Yeah, that’s what Tony [Biner, his best friend] says.' He remained unconvinced."
In conclusion, Kulkis reflected, "I could go on and on with the Hickey stories, as I’m sure anyone who knew him can. He was the epitome of live fast and die young, and the years of drugs and hard living eventually took their toll on his body. Recently he had a bunch of teeth replaced, and was on dialysis and a waiting list for a new kidney. (He claimed he was offered a 'bargain kidney' with 'barely positive' HIV but turned it down.) He sounded hopeful when he wrote me toward the end of last year. He said he had a new job handling the merchandise division for a small printer. And ever the hustler, he told me that if I ever decided to write a book, he now had the hook-up to publish it and we should get together to discuss. In hindsight, I wish I’d accepted that invite. Rest in peace, Jef. You were a speedball in the vein of the universe. Thanks for the high."
Million had similar closing thoughts, offering: "There so much to say about Jef, oh my god. I don't know what else to say about him other than he was fucking brilliant. A brilliant writer. Heart of gold. At least with me."
Photo from Jef Hickey's Facebook page
