R.I.P. RICHH

[Undertoad]

I just heard a sad note, that Rich Halberstein died late last year.

RICHH, as he was known, came on the Cellar shortly after it was founded and became one of its most colorful personalities.

RICHH had an incredible talent: he was a writer. But not just any writer... he wrote incredible stories. Many of his tales were full of the most incredibly explicit pornography ever known. But it wasn't just any porn; it was quite different. He avoided every porn story stereotype... not easy to do.

People who read RICHH, whether they read the porn or the "regular" bits or both, knew that he had a very special talent. His writing was really compelling and direct. He had a first-person narrative style all his own. Which was part of the problem: he would never fit into the editing of the real world. I urged him to submit to places like the New Yorker, and he said at one point that he had, but he was clearly too far ahead of his time.

How far ahead? It took the release of "There's Something About Mary" for the US audience to realize that it was highly susceptible to half-pornographic, gross-out humor, and that was probably the first time the world took a turn in RICHH's direction.

The Cellar gave him his first net access and with it, his relationship with talk.bizarre that would finally end in the development of his very own newsgroup, alt.butt.harp. The group's name came from one of his most explicit stories.

I met RICHH twice, once at a Cellar get-together at Philly's Reading Terminal Market, the other time for a dinner at a local brewery. He kept much of the details of his life a mystery; he alleged that he made a living at gambling on football, but we never figured out whether he was serious. In person, he didn't really match up with his stories; for example, he was in a wheelchair, which he managed extremely well with, but it clearly was not part of the RICHH image.

At the same time, he was clearly a guy who saw things that the rest of us didn't. I was in the area where he went to college, and I was surprised to see a local bar ("Barangus") that he'd written about. Surely his story wasn't true, but I liked to think that he had seen the place and let his imagination run with it.

RICHH spent a good 4-5 years here, but dropped off after he decided to move to the west coast. From time to time we would hear bits from him, but even his participation in his own newsgroup eventually dropped off.

You can still find RICHH's material, out there on the web in various archives. Google search for "richh archives". Unfortunately this isn't the best way to read him; his stuff is kinda uneven, and much of it is really meant to be consumed in the context of the newsgroups where he originally posted much of it.

<i>Bye man, and thanks for all the stories.</i>