NY porn king Marty Hodas' daughter and her siblings once consumed pot thinking they were chocolate brownies
As New York's King of Porn, Marty Hodas, began accumulating unprecedented wealth in the 1970s, his middle-class lifestyle changed along with it. Hodas owned every 25-cent sleazy peep show across Time Square back then and as sacks of coins worth thousands of dollars began dropping in on his table, his taste for extravagant things grew stronger. Drugs, sex, and violence became a norm in the house filled with four children and a bipolar wife.
"I used to steal thousands of dollars of cocaine from my parents on the weekend when I was a teen," Romola Hodas, the 60-year-old daughter of Marty Hodas told MEA Worldwide (MEAWW).
"They had pot, LSD, there was stuff all over the place and tonnes of liquor. Everybody partied way too much at my house. It was hard for me to watch the kids go through. Two of my siblings had a very rough time with drugs and alcohol. I am moderate, I still drink but I am healthy about it 95 percent of the time," she said.
Talking about her parents' weekly swinger pool parties at their house in New York, Romola said that growing up in Marty's house was very rough for her and her siblings — her two younger sisters and younger brother. She said that from childhood, she struggled to be a surrogate parent for her siblings as she felt protective of them considering her disturbed parents. Romola's father was abusive and her mother had bipolar disorder and was mostly emotionally distant.
Romola, in her new book titled 'The Princess of 42nd Street: Surviving my Childhood as the Daughter of Times Squares' King of Porn', stated that she and her siblings were exposed to drugs and strangers having sex at their house at a very young age.
"There were lots of drugs, crazy parties and things children should not be seeing. Topless waitresses breastfeeding kittens, people doing drugs having sex all over the house, it was just — rough," she told MEAWW.
The 60-year-old, recounting her dread of her father in her book, wrote: "As the clock inched closer to 6:00 p.m., I would start rounding up the kids, telling them 'Get into your rooms! Hurry! Daddy’ll be home any minute!' I knew he would be in a foul, frightening mood when he arrived home from work, coming down hard and fast from an intense high fueled by cocaine or Black Beauty amphetamines, and until he leveled off with a couple of glasses of vodka on ice, he’d be violent and unpredictable, dangerous as a freshly sharpened blade."
Romola also wrote of the instance when she and her siblings mistakenly consumed marijuana thinking the baked goods kept on the table were just what they looked like — chocolate brownies.
"Perhaps inevitably, the lines between the adult world and our world blurred. One time, Risa, her friend, Joyce, and I found a tray of brownies on the counter in the kitchen. We assumed someone had dropped them off for the swingers’ party that night. They looked delicious, so we dug in and devoured some of them, shoving the rich, gooey chocolate goodness into our mouths. And then afterward, I knew right away what was wrong, why I felt so sluggish and giggly and just wanted to lie in bed and listen to my records—the brownies had been laced with pot."
"But Risa and Joyce were only 12 and had never gotten high before, so the pot made them feel weird and scared. I didn’t want to tell them they were getting high because I didn’t want to scare them more than they already were. It took a while for the pot to leave our systems, and I was furious at my parents for exposing us to drugs. This time it was only pot, but what if next time it was coke or speed or heroin?" Romola wrote in her book.
The author said that she, from an early age, had made a resolution to write down everything that she was going through in that house one day, and that after decades she decided to pen her torment in her latest book, but only after her father died.
"No matter what I went through, I loved my father, he's my crazy, crazy man. I didn't want to embarrass him. When he died about four and a half years ago, I started to write," she said.