Life of a Masochist, back cover
Larry Townsend wrote about the legendary R.F.M. at my request, in his Bound & Gagged column for Issue 70 (May, 1999). I had discovered R.F.M. around the same time I discovered Larry, in the early 70s, and over time had managed to acquire a number of his publications which, if sometimes sloppy in the writing and everything else, were pretty much the only gay male bondage magazines out there, very hot, and even then hard to find.
I sold two R.F.M. publications for $150 each a few weeks ago. I have four more, well, actually three that I'll offer here for the same price, $150 apiece, plus s & h. The fourth, Leather and Things, is a kind of catalog that's only really of interest for its historic value, which I should think is considerable. But I can't find it in my heart to ask more than $100 for it, and warn you here that it should only be bought by true collectors of mid-20th Century bondage memorabilia. For informational purposes, the big crease in the picture was never my doing, it was the way the publication was sent to me.
The issues pictured here will be itemized by price, payment method and shipping and handling info at the end of this post.
Now here's Larry on RFM:
At the request of several readers, the B&G editor among them, I’m going to tell you about one of the great characters from leather/SM lore. The man was a friend of mine for the last several years of his life. During this period I knew him fairly well—about as well as I wanted to know him, because he really was quite mad and certainly unique. I refer, of course, to the guy who liked to style himself “L. T.’s friendly competitor” Roger Francis Mays, commonly known as R.F.M. This is his story as best I know it. (Unfortunately, The Readers’ Digest declined to carry this account in their Most Memorable Characters series. I wonder why.)
To say that Roger was mad may be to slightly simplify the case. He was clever and skilled in many areas, abysmally ignorant in others. I first became aware of him when he started advertising his magazines and approached me to carry them on my list. I had only been in business four or five years at that point, and was immediately interested. So one evening I motored out to Pomona, which is a smallish city on the far east end of Los Angeles County. I found Roger living in an old, rickety Victorian house with a veranda around three sides, tall weeds in the front yard—in all a place that would have fit well into a Charles Addams cartoon.
To this point I had never seen Roger, having only talked to him on the phone. When he answered my knock (the doorbell was broken) he seemed to fit well into his surroundings. He was of moderate height and build, dressed in tattered jeans and well-aged T-shirt. His large, protruding eyes gave me the once-over before he pushed back the screen door and asked me in. He offered me a cup of coffee, which he made with instant powder under the hot water tap. We then went into his “study,” where we sat and talked for a long time. In the course of this I came to like him, although his obvious instability made me a bit wary.
Now, I have to say in my own defense that I am not especially elegant in dress or demeanor. In fact my family had even then despaired of my ever being properly gentrified. But Roger want far beyond my disregard for the proprieties. First, he was very much into drugs, which made him ever popular with the young twinkies who attended the local colleges and who populated the discos and coffee shops (and subsequently his dungeon.) But his fame as the local candyman was eventually to prove his undoing, in that he later became terribly paranoid, convinced that the authorities were going to get him. But that was several years in the future.
On this first night he showed me the construction he was doing in the house, including the attic area that was to become a well-equipped dungeon. He had built a very solid staircase leading up to this from the kitchen area. Unfortunately he had neglected to account for the thickness of the wood and had ended up with a bottom step that was only four inches above the floor. He was furious that the Department of Building & Safety had refused to approve it and had told him it had to be torn down. (It never was.)
Over time, Roger told me many stories about himself, most of which I presume were true. For instance, before moving into his present quarters he had lived on his “ranch” (actually a former farm, with stable yard and barn). This was during his Batman era. It was also during the rampage of The Freeway Killer, a serial murderer who tossed his naked (male) victims onto the side of the freeway after subjecting them to a variety of sexual horrors. One of these corpses was found near the neighborhood where Roger lived, and when the police questioned the locals one of them said they had better check out that “weird one up the street. He drives a pick-up truck and wears a cape.” The cops responded immediately, handcuffing Roger and his housemate while they dug up the back yard. They found bones that were later identified as bovine, but the episode strained his already tenuous relationship with the neighbors, and was the main reason for his moving to his current abode.
This was the time that amyl nitrite [original poppers] was in wide use, and could be bought over the counter without a prescription. Once the authorities discovered that people were buying it for recreational purposes they made it a controlled substance. As a result, a number of substitutes came on the market (all of which were far less benign than real amyl) and Roger was quick to jump on the bandwagon. He bottled Cobra Aroma I & 2, Cum, and several others and sold them mail order. They were still legal at this point, mainly because the authorities hadn’t tumbled to their existence. I remember going to Roger’s house one night and finding him on the front terrace filling little brown bottles from a 55-gallon drum. His only protection was a painter’s mouth mask. He was, of course, high as a kite. As soon as he saw me he decided he needed a cigarette, stepped back about ten feet from the drum and lit up despite my screaming at him that he was going to blow up the entire neighborhood. He didn’t, despite one’s being able to smell the material from at least two blocks away. He was so ripped he got the giggles and told me that two men had been in the post office that day when he went to pick up his mail. They had followed him, he said, but he had gotten onto the freeway and lost them when he reached speeds over 100 mph.
This was the night Roger wanted me to stay and join him in “breaking in a new slave.” The kid arrived an hour or so later, and Roger strapped him down to a rack that he had downstairs in the “dining room.” (It was there because he had acquired it from Larry Young, the Mad Welder, all assembled and it was too heavy to move upstairs.) Both Roger and kid started snorting something (cocaine?) and were soon so far gone I could see a terrible catastrophe in the making; so after a quick blow job from the slave, I left. The next morning I called Roger to see how everything had gone. He had just gotten back from the hospital where the kid was in intensive care. Roger admitted (later) that he had fucked the kid while wearing a metal 7-gates-of-hell and had apparently torn him up pretty badly. The kid eventually recovered and there were no further repercussions.
A more serious incident took place with Roger’s friend and business partner. (I’ve forgotten his name; I’ll call him Frank.) Anyway, Roger and Frank were in partnership buying old houses, fixing them up and selling or leasing them. Frank, looking for Roger, went to the house they were currently working on; Roger wasn’t there. (Now, this is a story I told in the original Leatherman’s Handbook, but in case you missed it. . . .) Frank saw the old weights that Roger had removed from the window sashes and decided to have a hot solo JO session. He managed to work one of these weights up his ass and did his thing. Afterward he didn’t feel too well, but managed to get himself to Roger’s house, where he collapsed on the kitchen floor. That was where Roger found him, revived him, and after hearing his story decided that the best thing would be to give him an enema. This only caused a huge discharge of blood from Frank’s asshole, which scared them both so badly that Roger loaded him into his car and rushed him to the emergency hospital. The nurse on duty was a great, tough diesel dyke who was shooting the breeze with a pair of cops when Roger rushed in.
“I have an . . . an industrial accident in the car,” he told her.
“What kind of accident?” she demanded.
“Well, er, severe rectal bleeding. He shoved a sash weight up his ass.”
“Did he shove a sash weight up his ass, or did you shove a sash weight up his ass?”
The cops, of course, were grinning and enjoying every morsel of Roger’s discomfort, and the nurse was playing to her audience.
This embarrassing exchange continued for a little longer before Frank was finally admitted and given emergency care. He ended up with a colostomy for six months before they could put him back together again.
Over the years I knew him, Roger had many other adventures—more than space permits my telling here. He tried very hard to emulate me in some ways, but my strengths were his weaknesses (and vice versa). I was certainly no carpenter or mechanic, and Roger—as desperately as he tried, simply could not write the wonderful plots he dreamed up. He compromised by drafting his stories, then having an academic translate them into English for him.
But he was a fairly accomplished chemist, and near the end of his life he started making “designer drugs”—things that were legal only because the authorities had not yet thought to make them otherwise. But worry over this just made him ever more convinced that his arrest was imminent. Yet when I suggested he could just quit making the stuff he said he couldn’t stop. It was a compulsion. I know one of the things he made he called “snow” and he claimed it had an effect similar to cocaine.
The kids, of course, were flocking to him by this time and he was involved in a great, continuous orgy. He did manage a few confrontations with the cops because of the outrageously loud music roaring out of his attic dungeon during the wee hours of the morning. Fortunately the police never actually came inside. Roger used to call me up and tell me about his close calls. I remember once he said that he had strapped his slave down and set the whipping machine to give him a good working over just before the cops started hammering on his door. He went down to get rid of them, leaving the kid under the machine. Fortunately the little fucker loved to get whipped and was too wired to realize he’d lost most of the skin from his ass by the time Roger got back to release him.
Then came Tyke. This was a cute little blond number whom Roger kept naked, secured by his neck via a long chain attached to a wall in the middle of the house. This was the kid who eventually became Roger’s heir, when our friend died mysteriously on the way home late at night from one of the sex clubs. He had been at The Basic Plumbing, left sometime after 2 a.m. and was later found in his car in the center divider of the San Bernardino Freeway. He was dead behind the wheel, but he had not crashed and the only suspicious substance found in his body was ether. No one could ever be sure exactly what killed him.
My last sight of him was at the “viewing” where he was all laid out like Poor Jud with his hands accrost his chest, and I thought: Roger, you crazy bastard, at least you’ve gone where they can’t catch you.
R.F.M. Publications for sale:
The Life of a Masochist $150 + s&h
Picture Book of Bondage $150 + s&h
A Collection of S/M $150 + s&h
Leather and Things $100 + s&h
Shipping & handling fees:
In the domestic U.S., $7.60 for first item, $2.50 for each additional item.
If you're outside the country, contact me for the fees at [email protected].
All payments to be made into my PayPal account: [email protected]
Comments