“He spent a lifetime peddling smut and once had an $11 million fortune, but after losing everything and becoming just another homeless New Yorker, Al Goldstein is now happy pushing bagels instead of porn. Goldstein, a founding father of America’s porn industry, now hustles bagels and white fish at a New York-based deli and catering establishment. ‘I’ve always loved food more than sex, so this is really my first love,’ said Goldstein, 69, now a cold-calling salesman for New York City Bagels. ‘I’ve gone from broads to bagels.’ Goldstein has good reason to feel good about his new career, however mundane, after becoming homeless last year when the porn empire he began building in 1968 collapsed… ‘The Internet made pornography available for free and I couldn’t compete,’ said Goldstein… ‘My life has turned to crap,’ Goldstein said. ‘To go from a being a millionaire and then living in a homeless shelter and being rejecting by 98 percent of your friends is horrendous, but I’m a survivor.’” —Yahoo.com (US)

From rags to riches and back again — it’s an old story, the American dream and then, with the recurrence of poverty, the American waking-up. Al Goldstein once had a pornographic empire — Screw magazine and a show on cable television — and all the Hugh Hefner accoutrements that come with it: a mansion, fine cigars, beautiful babes. (Note that the old geezer, in spite of his poverty and occasional homelessness, is still married to a 28-year-old!) Then he failed to adapt when the internet transformed the porn business, and he quickly spiralled down into homeless abjection. Yes, hawking bagels is a step up because there were points where the former millionaire was even living in homeless shelters.

The article mentions how everyone that Goldstein befriended in the porn business turned their backs on him in his time of need, and it also mentions his estranged relationship with his son, Jordan Goldstein. Apparently Goldstein Junior, a graduate of Harvard Law School, refuses to have anything to do with his father. He won’t even speak to him. In another article, Goldstein père says of his son:

“He must really hate me,” Al said of Jordan. “We haven’t talked ever since he didn’t invite me to his graduation from law school three years ago. He’s sold my collection of wristwatches, which was all I had left. And I was a good father. I sent him to magic camp. I took him to horse ranches. I gave him everything he wanted.”

And while these profiles of Al Goldstein make it sound as though he’s a sort of victim who’s been abandoned by his son, you can’t help but suspect that there’s more to it than that. In fact, imagine the psychological situation of the son. On one hand, his father was notorious, a kind of Mayor of Porn, an outspoken and shameless icon of a business that was associated with nothing but creepy sleaze until only recently. On the other hand, evidently Jordan Goldstein — who apparently is not the same Jordan Golstein who works for the FCC, which would have been a delicious twist — must have strived to build a more “normal” or respectable life. He went to Harvard, now he works for a New York law firm. It’s a classic generational conflict. Rather than run from it, you can’t help but think Jordan Goldstein should write it up and sell it to the moviemakers — quick, before his father does it.

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