Little Devil

As a boy in the 1960s, I was not alone in loving gladiators, baby oil, juvenile delinquents, and fighting, in any combination or all together. There was, of course, Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild. Even though it's unlikely that I knew about AMG back then, I have the impression that I thumbed through copies of the magazine Physique Pictorial in early adolescence at latest, perhaps as early as age eleven, but it's impossible that I would have seen them at the Yokota Air Force Base exchange in Japan or in a Las Vegas newsstand while my father was stationed at Nellis. Still, the impression is hard to shake.

Anyway, I was not alone. And the record remains, thanks to Mizer's voluminous stash of photographs and 8-mm movies, still on view at the Athletic Model Guild website. The focus of the pictures above is the very popular Jim (or Jimmy or Jaymes) Collette, who looks like what would have been my ideal "big brother" (I was a sad only child back then), a composite of American Bandstand audience member and leather-jacket-wearing hood. He's paired with Tommy Evans, also popular. Smaller than I would have imagined, 5'7", 150#, Jimmy was the model bad boy of the times, with pompadour and "little devil" tattoo. Unfortunately, he died in 1968, drowning in the Colorado River, his body full of alcohol and drugs. But he survives in my memory as a beautiful teen angel who liked other boys to beat him up.