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Big Trouble

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At nineteen, Haney had a low, gravelly rumble of a voice. Combined with his West Texas accent, the distinctive growl got him a job as a DJ at a small Texas radio station, where he worked the graveyard shift. The post was not as exciting as he'd imagined, though, and neither was the five-bucks-an-hour pay. He had a female friend who danced at a local strip joint called the Crazy Horse, and sometimes he'd pick her up after work. One night, the manager recognized Haney's voice from the radio and offered him a job deejaying at both of his strip clubs.

The gig changed Haney's life forever. "He started working for a strip club," remembers a former associate, "and his stripper friend wanted to start doing some things on the side, so he kind of looked after her. Then it kind of took off from there."

For a time, Haney stuck with the club for his main source of income, just supervising the "things on the side." Within a year, he was managing the club and "doing drugs and doing strippers," he said, until the pace became too much. So at 22, he moved to New York City with a girlfriend, looking for a clean start. But he was drawn back to the business he knew best, and began managing Stringfellows, a strip club. Soon Haney was opening new clubs in cities along the East Coast.

But once again, he burned out. This time he made a complete about-face and moved back to Texas. He took a 9-to-5 job in customer service for Microsoft.

That didn't last: Embracing a starched-collar environment just wasn't Haney's style. Before long, he'd taken a job selling ads for a local adult-entertainment throwaway called Night Moves. After the editor was put in jail for reasons that Haney couldn't -- or wouldn't -- elaborate on, he was tossed the role of editor. The position ended when the rag went belly-up.

Haney began selling ads for Adult Stars, a free sex publication with outlets in multiple cities that survived by courting businesses that other media outlets wouldn't work with: escort agencies, strip clubs, sex shops and other adult services. The company's owners were so impressed with Haney's ambition and sales ability that they sent the 28-year-old to Colorado in 1999 to start a similar rag in Denver. But the Mile High version of Adult Stars lasted only two months.

At the time, the free adult-magazine market on the Front Range was dominated by the Rocky Mountain Oyster, a mainstay of retro '70s soft-core smut printed on gritty newsprint. Haney knew that if he wanted to get a slice of the market, he was going to have to go bigger. He got financial backing from some of the then-owners of Christal's, a chain of local sex shops owned by Golden-based ZJ Gifts, to start Rocky Mountain Go-Go. Haney figured he needed to distinguish his publication from the Oyster, so he printed the magazine on expensive, glossy stock in four colors and offered more content, including interviews with porn actresses. He also penned his own page-two column that included pictures of him advancing his average-guy-getting-lucky strategy: Gary with a lollipop girl, Gary getting a kiss from a dominatrix, Gary palming a pair of enormous stripper tits.

After five issues, though, it became clear that this approach wasn't working, either. The sex market wasn't big enough, and the city "just wasn't ready for the type of adult publication I was going to put out there," Haney explained.

He decided to move his magazine from the adult-entertainment niche into one that appealed to young urbanites looking for a good time. While it was still sex-friendly, the bi-weekly -- renamed simply Go-Go -- was enlarged to a tabloid format and filled with articles about local musicians, artists and upcoming events.

Haney asked Bobby Lee Black, a former minor-league pro wrestler, voice actor, tattoo artist and ex-con, to write a food column. With only an eighth-grade education, Black had zero experience in writing, let alone food writing. But Haney saw something in the recovered drug addict that he thought fit with Go-Go's new image, and "Tattooed Food Critic" became one of the magazine's longest-running features.

"He gave me a big opportunity that nobody else in their right mind would've ever thought of doing," Black says. "That's just the type of mind he had. He was a lateral thinker. He had the ability to see beyond the surface of things."

Go-Go's investors at Christal's weren't as enamored with Haney's approach, and their stake was soon bought out by Trygve Lode, a local actor, bodybuilder and independent filmmaker who also owns a venture-capital firm called Midgard. The magazine grew, hiring an editor and art director. But Go-Go still struggled to define its identity, and which direction it should take became an ongoing debate between Haney and his new owners. In November 2000, Haney stopped down as publisher, saying that the two sides simply had different notions of where Go-Go should go.

But there was more to it than that, according to Darlene Cysper, CEO of Midgard. The other owners felt that Haney wasn't "keeping track of the finances and getting the salespeople on board that we wanted to keep," she says, "and that's essential when you're ad-supported only." She also cites a fair amount of friction between editor Chris Magyar and Haney. "I think that if anything, he was overly ambitious," she adds. "I think that sometimes his plans extended his capabilities to carry them out. And he was a big dreamer."

And Haney had big dreams for his next project, a sure-as-shit gold mine. He walked away from Go-Go and never looked back at publishing. Instead, he returned to the adult-entertainment business, an industry he understood -- and enjoyed.

"Once Gary has done something to the best of his ability, he wants to move on and do something else," says Black, who continued writing his food column until Go-Go went out of business in 2003. He was the one who tagged Haney as "Marlon Brando on Acid," and while obesity was the most obvious characteristic Haney shared with the late actor, Black had something else in mind when he made the remark to his former boss.

"There's a level of both talent and tragedy that you see in Marlon Brando," he explains. "And that's Gary. He's a Scorpio to the edge of his bones."

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