Pauly Shore: All O'Shore

Taking a break from "living the fast life," Pauly Shore conducts a tour of his haunted Hollywood Hills home, reveals how he lost his virginity, and explains that, basically, he's just "trash."

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There are a lot of reasons why it's difficult to have a relationship in this town," Pauly Shore tells me, sprawled across the living room sofa of his two-story, '20s-vintage. faux-Spanish raspberryhued hacienda perched low in the Hollywood Hills. "Girls, basically, run this town because they have the pussy. Especially the hot chicks. I can meet a girl at The Rainbow. Or a stewardess on a plane. A girl at one of my shows. But every one of them, like everyone in this town, wants something. Everyone wants to make it. They figure that if they go out with me, because I know everyone, they'll meet a bunch of different people that could kind of benefit them, get them where they want to go. I don't trust a lot of girls out here," he continues. "I could take a girl to a club and there could be fucking Tom Cruise, or somebody, and then she's with him for a while and then Daniel Day-Lewis" shows up and suddenly she's with him. It's like, nothing is good enough for any of them. I also don't trust a lot of my friends. You don't wanna introduce your girl to your friends because the second you stop going out with her, your friends are all over her. Or maybe they're all over her even when you're going out. People love to do things that are bad. It's no fun tossing and turning in bed at four o'clock in the morning thinking that your chick's out there getting fucked by Fabio."

Shore utters this little morality tale as we sip herbal tea and do what he calls "some post-movie chillin'," a reference to how we've met shortly after he finished making In the Army Now, a Disney summer comedy that presents Shore joining the army as a goof and winding up involved in Steven Seagalesque derring-do in a Middle Eastern desert.

If I didn't know Shore was a bachelor-about-town from the stories he tells, I could easily discern it from his house's interior-design scheme -- the arched doorways are tricked out with whorehouse beads, the bedroom has copper walls, and the furniture is from the now destroyed Dunes Hotel in Vegas. But I haven't dropped by just to hear his horror stories of the show-biz singles scene. I want to hear about his hoped-for transition from three years of MTV celebrity as the stoney, moronic geek of "Totally Pauly" to the stoney, moronic geek for movies like Encino Man and Son-in-Law. And stuff like whether he's jealous of Jim Carrey, his old stand-up comedy pal, who, after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, rakes in $7 million a movie. About his screwy upbringing as the son of comic Sammy Shore and Mitzi Shore, the latter the owner of the legendary The Comedy Store on Sunset, where little Pauly got to check out the young Robin Williams, Sam Kinison and others. About the wisdom of buying a house --even one that once served as a crash pad for deadbeats and struggling comics--on an earthquake fault line. And, amid plugs for his upcoming comedy album, about how he and Disney are talking about his directing a short movie and star ring with Goldie Hawn in a Graduate-type movie.

It turns out that up close, Shore is both more ambitious and more out there than one might guess. Barefoot, in a slept-in T-shirt and baggy pants, Shore runs his palms over his buzzed scalp -- a souvenir of his army movie -- and continues his plaint about how tough it is to have a relationship in Hollywood. "I left this girl at my house to go to a business lunch," he tells me, "and when I came back, she's all pissed off because she had gone through my entire stash of videotapes of me with hot chicks fucking around. I was fucking furious, but, I mean, you're caught on tape, you're guilty. I turned around and said, 'What the fuck are you doing looking through my tapes, anyway? If you don't like it, then you gotta bail.' I never really liked any of those chicks," he explains of the women on the tapes in question. "I wasn't really having sex with them. It was more like I was filming their breasts or they were just saying funny things."

Maybe, I suggest, he should tell me about the kind of women he's meeting these days. "Now, at a club or something, you're just gonna meet girls that you fuck," he replies. "You give them your number, they come over late, they blow you. You fuck them. Whatever. Girls are not gonna be attracted to me necessarily by my looks, but because I'm smart, nice, and sensitive to them. Ninety-nine percent of guys are assholes who treat women very mean. I'm not the average guy who goes to The Red Onion and smacks his chick for looking the wrong way. But I gotta say, I imagine it would be interesting to go out with a girl who had her shit together. I've never been boyfriend-girlfriend with someone that is as successful as me or more successful. Every girl that I have gone out with has come from a very similar background: all from shitty homes, who don't know what they want out of life. I keep 'em up, take care of 'em. Kind of a father figure, but these girls are so fucked up. And then, I'm stuck with this baggage on my shoulders."

Since I know that he once had on his shoulders, among other places, the curvy, bosomy, adult-video performer Savannah, I ask Shore, "What's the deal with movie actors going out with porn stars?" "Do you know Charlie Sheen?" he asks. "Well, the reason Charlie Sheen liked going out with Ginger Lynn was because it was like dating himself: trash. He's trash. I'm trash. Guys are attracted to girls that are in porn. It's like a sickness, you know? See, guys just like to fuck and get sucked off by hot chicks. It's a phase that I went through and I guess he went through, too."

Shore suddenly hollers, "Grease! Grease!" --his nickname for his housemate, Bobby, an outgoing, burly guy --and when he walks in, Shore asks, "Do you have those little stand-ups of me and Savannah?" Grease is back in seconds, setting on the coffee table before us an array of six-inch-high cutout photos of Shore and Savannah, showing off their tans in various stages of undress. "We took those in Hawaii, like, two, three years ago," Shore recalls. "Aren't they cute? We just had a good time. My whole thing back then was, and is, that I really don't care what you do for a living, so long as you're cool. I'm less that way now, because I have more respect for myself than back then. I guess all this stuff with women relates to stuff with my mom. Me and my mom are very similar."

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