A few minutes before midnight on Saturdays, a busboy tapes garbage bags over the windows of the Twisted Spoke in preparation for Smut & Eggs, the bar’s weekly pairing of dirty movies and late-night brunch. Sometimes only a few people show up, but on a recent Saturday the mostly young, mostly female crowd was two deep at the bar. At the far end, sitting by himself and drinking beer from a short glass, was a tiny, trim 50-year-old who goes by the name Pudgy. As people passed by he handed them printouts with information on the double feature of French flicks he’d programmed for the evening: Prisons Tres Speciales Pour Femmes, aka Jailhouse Sex, from 1982, and Parties Fines, aka The Education of the Baroness, from 1977. “Some nights I’ll go really nice, really genteel,” he said. “Tonight I’m weaving to the other side, because a women’s prison movie is gonna have some harsh scenes in it.”
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Smut & Eggs debuted in April of 1998. The event wasn’t Pudgy’s idea, but he was one of its earliest and biggest fans. “This was heaven for him,” says Twisted Spoke owner Cliff Einhorn. “He’s a porn aficionado. He’s completely, unabashedly into it.” The second time Pudgy attended he brought in a smutty remake of Some Like It Hot called Girls on Fire, one of the more than 300 videos he keeps at his west-side home. He says the bar staff asked him 75 minutes later if he wanted to be the official Smut & Eggs curator; he accepted. Pudgy started bringing in the hard stuff and a neighbor caught a glimpse through the bar’s windows and called the vice squad. Management asked him to tone it down until they figured out a solution. “They said–pardon my French–‘Don’t show anything with dicks,’” he says. “I had to go home and pull a two-hour soft-X film off the library.” The following week the garbage bags went up.
A good chunk of the videos in Pudgy’s collection came from purveyors on the Internet, some of whom he hooked up with through online exploitation-movie forums. When he selects a film for Smut & Eggs, Pudgy always makes a point of including his source in the program notes. “I feel it’s important, because it’s not like I’m saying I bought these from a vendor on Maxwell Street,” he says. Prisons Tres Speciales, for example, was purchased from Shocking Videos in Hinton, West Virginia; there weren’t any credits on the tape, just a title card in the box, so he researched the cast and production credits through the European Girls’ Adult Film Database (egafd.com). He includes that sort of information on his handouts, along with a basic synopsis of the film: “Guess where an inmate has her temperature taken? (Yes.) Deduce how the female warden uses her riding crop? (Yes again.)”
Later on, as a man in detective garb stood center screen and came on two women to his left and right, Pudgy got in on the act. “And there’s one squirt for you,” he said, turning in one direction, then another, pointing his fingers. “And there’s one for you. And then I’m going to come on you!” The bar was nearly empty: only five men and a woman remained. “When was this made?” the woman asked. “1982!” Pudgy replied. She nodded blankly and turned back to the screen.
