Porn Valley- I read Tarot Cards and the last six weeks have been predicting nothing but death. Death of acquaintances. Death of loved ones. In my 20 years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything like it. And though I had a sense that Jim Holliday was dying I never made the Holliday connection with my readings. Which is no surprise because making connection with Holliday was not an easy task. It was always on his terms. He only told you the things he wanted you to know about himself. I knew he was from Ohio. I know he had worked in carnivals. I believe he worked in radio for a time. I knew he bet on sports. A lot. Baseball, especially.

And I knew him to have a steal trap mind for facts as they related to the adult business. Holliday’s was an encyclopedic recall of people, of movies, of events, and of pique. The last 18 months of Jim Holliday’s life, I would have to say were consumed with pique. I can’t put it any other way. And Holliday could certainly obsess. I remember once how a throwaway item in my Gene Duz Gossip column in AVN had Holliday on a toot for months. It was about a store signing he was involved in and the fact that attendance might not have been what it was expected to be. Holliday could not let that sleeping dog lie and we argued over it for a length of time that bordered on the absurd. But much more over his AVN columns. Holliday’s stipulation with the magazine was that not one precious word be altered. And in those times that they were for the sake of editorial coherence, Holliday roared in his own way. Much like the conversations I shared with him these past 18 months.

Holliday was focused only on one thing during this period- perveived slight. And I believe it was that slight that killed him. Holliday felt he had been ignored by the powers that pretend to be- AVN. It had to do with reviews; it had to do with some overview of industry directors where Holliday felt he wasn’t placed on equal footing with contemporaries he always claimed he outsold. Because I don’t read AVN, I’m still not sure what this particular article Holliday was referring to, but he obsessed over it. Constantly. I busted his balls about his obsessing over it. He acknowledged that he was obsessing. But in those months I saw and heard Holliday fall into the abyss. The obsession killed him as much as anything else.

And I’m not talking out of my abyss, either, because Holliday gave me these interviews with the stipulation that at some point he’d give me the green light to run them. Or, in the worst case scenario, after his death. My exchanges with Holliday often reminded me of a scene in the Errol Flynn movie They Died with Their Boots On. Flynn plays General Custer and Custer, knowing that the Indians are about to have their sacred land invaded by the railroad barons, attempts to persuade the U.S. Congress that the news of a gold strike in the Black Hills was a scam to justify US expansion into the Dakota territory. Custer/Flynn is asked if he has proof of his allegations and he shakes his head, sadly, no. He’s then told that in lieu of proof only a dying declaration would be accepted. And in a sense, Holliday’s chats with me- five years of them all told- were dying declarations.

In one cold moment of irony, Jim Holliday told me that before he died, he’d love to know the true identity of an AVN writer who blasted one of his movies, Eternal Virgins. And that may be as good a starting point as any.