The uneasy combination of naivete and nudity pretty much sums up The Probe. The zine, which comes out roughly once a year, is just a part of Muentz's life. But much of the rest of that life is spent working to support the mag. Muentz grew up a metal kid in Pleasanton; he flunked out of high school but eventually worked his way through junior college and graduated from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo with a degree in history. He came back north after school and started The Probe five years ago as a bored pizza-restaurant employee with a burgeoning interest in the punk underground. Along the way he started substitute teaching (though this has been on hold since his move to S.F.) and trucking; these days he spends a lot of time moving tomatoes up and down Highway 5.
The nude women first appeared, he recalls, as "an accident"; some former college friends contributed photos of themselves for the first issue; in the second, he and several male buddies reciprocated. Now, with a circulation of 5,000, The Probe boasts a thick, 132-page heft, bettering production values, and a recurring cast of local scenesters from punk bands like Hickey, Your Mother, and All You Can Eat -- not to mention a spiraling debt and a reputation that often baffles its creator.
"It's a quintessential personal zine," says Ramsey Kanaan, whose AK Press distributes The Probe. Muentz himself puts it another way: "All I do is write about myself." The most recent issue, Probe No. 6, came out last spring; copies can sometimes still be found at local zine purveyors like Leather Tongue and Naked Eye. Besides featuring the usual passel of reviews and photos, Probe No. 6 chronicles in excruciating detail what Muentz describes as the worst year of his life, from the trials of having to abandon longtime "Probe house" to his credit-card debt to his baroque love life. What often amounts to little more than navel-gazing in other personal zines becomes, by virtue of Muentz's liquor-fueled prose and natural ability to deliver a punch line, a singularly entertaining fusion of bravado and pathos. (From the intro: "I sometimes wonder why I bother publishing this thing at all. I hate to write. On any given night I'd much rather just watch a Clint Eastwood movie or something. [...] Why not ditch this zine and just get an easy, well paying job? Become happy and stable, join society, find a nice girl to settle down with.... Of course, when I get drunk I see things more clearly and my life makes perfect sense.")
The Probe's renown has been soaring since issue No. 5, when the usual naked photos were joined by the "girl reviews," a marathon record of Muentz's every sexual or near-sexual experience since grade school. "I thought of it about two issues before they appeared," Muentz explains. "At the time I was thinking it would be more interesting than record reviews, and I had this idea of doing a little half-page on each one." The epic tale that ultimately sprawled across Probes 5 and 6 (subtitled "The Metal Years" and "The Punk Years," respectively) is rife with rejection, miscommunication, and queasy, meticulous accounts of what the author himself aptly calls "disastersex." The way-more-than-half-page reviews sometimes dwell on actual sex, but more often reveal the tortuous emotional entanglements that accompany it, with results both hilarious and painful. In one, Muentz travels to Arcata for what he thinks is guaranteed action with a sometime girlfriend. He spends hundreds of words detailing his negotiations for the trip:
I told her, "I want to sleep with you. If you're not sure about that tell me now, because I don't want to drive all the way up there if we're not going to sleep together. I want to do other stuff too, but that's the main reason I want to see you." She said that was okay with her. I said, "So are we going to sleep together? I just want to make sure I'm being clear about my intentions. I'm not trying to be an asshole, but if I come up to see you and we don't sleep together I'll be totally disappointed."
With new sex toys and no less than "three different types of lubrication I wanted to try out" packed for the occasion, Muentz makes the long drive in the fog, but we the readers already know what will happen, or rather what won't.
Muentz's refusal to cast himself in the mold of a stud is only part of a larger willingness to bare all in the zine. "There's nothing I'm really afraid of anyone finding out about me," he shrugs. "It's not like I gotta work through the honesty. It just comes out whenever." This candor occasionally sours his relationships and, as in the Arcata story above, his accounts are not infrequently accompanied by a sense of impending doom. Perhaps not surprisingly, several of the tales end on a somewhat psycho note. Another girl review finds Muentz frazzled after a new girlfriend has begun avoiding him. After days of anguish, he goes over to her house late at night. No one answers the door, so Muentz matter-of-factly kicks it in. The woman's not there, but her roommates are. He apologizes to them, and hits the sack. "I was asleep," he writes, "when the cops came."
The Probe's cornerstones of sex and punk rock might seem to go hand in hand, but these dual obsessions have polarized the zine's audience. Those who flip through to be titillated find the long-winded show reviews superfluous; conversely, the nudity has inspired charges of sexism from punk's PC contingent. "This garbage has no place in the punk scene," fumes an unnamed writer in the We Ain't Got No Car zine, in reference to The Probe's placement on the AK Press table at a show by the group Propagandhi. Epicenter Zone, the underground press center in the Mission, refused to carry the zine for a short time after some of the staff took issue with the publication's content (it didn't help that one of Epicenter's workers was the roommate of another of Muentz's girlfriends whose door he'd kicked in), but it's currently back on the shelves.
"A common line [from stores] is 'Personally, I don't have any problem with it, but ...'." says Muentz. "Someone is always afraid they're going to get feminists crawling down their back for accepting it." The Probe gets around primarily through punk-rock distribution systems, and most of the ads placed in the zine are for record labels. "It's been the punk community that's kept The Probe going," he says. "Sex zines often say that I should drop the bands and stick with the girls, but that would be a dumb move, considering who supports me." Muentz's interest in nude photos notwithstanding, music makes up a large part of the zine's coverage, and when he does review the porn-related material sent his way, it's with far less relish than he reviews records.
As for the accusations of sexism, these seem to stem more from assumptions that women shouldn't be naked than from any actual sexist content. Jeanette Good, who has known Muentz for years and has posed for The Probe, scoffs at the idea that the zine is degrading: "What's degrading about a woman showing her body voluntarily? As for the girl reviews, if you were going to say that anyone in those scenarios had power, it's almost always -- in my opinion, with Aaron's writing -- the women. Whether or not someone finds it entertaining or insightful, there's nothing wrong with what Aaron's doing. It's not like he goes out and picks up women and uses them and throws them away."
Kris Rockass, the writer responsible for some of issue No. 6's best pieces -- notably a manic tale of a weekend show in Santa Cruz and an "unsolicited advice" column -- concurs. "Most of the nudity is actually initiated by the women. It's so much more honest and real than nudity in porno mags. For people who want to pose naked in a magazine, The Probe is more accessible than something like Playboy; these women don't fit that blond, big-boob thing." Rockass met Muentz slightly more than a year ago and soon afterward took over mail-order duties for the zine and for Probe Records. "Men and women may appreciate the nudity for different reasons," she says, "but they appreciate it."
"Ironically," Muentz says, "my most common detractors are sensitive males who give the zine the cold shoulder because they think it will score them some PC points with the women." Charges of sexism don't bother Muentz too much, though, and he points out that bad feedback is rare. (His first piece of hate mail, in fact, didn't arrive until issue No. 6.) More annoying to him is the reputation that's sprung up around him. The situation is this: "The Probe Guy" seems to be someone detached from the real Muentz. The question of where one ends and the other begins is a tricky one. "We were at this show, and I was wearing my Probe T-shirt," recalls Good, laughing, "and he said something about how I must have felt so cool to be seen with him because he's 'The Probe Guy.' And I was like, 'Oh, get over yourself!' " Muentz himself worries, during one of his disastersex episodes, about whether his performance will disappoint his partner. ("I'm the Probe Guy -- I have to be good!")
"I realize now more than ever that The Probe is kind of my whole personality," Muentz admits. "And I find that people assume that I'm some kind of authority; I get all these sex zines in the mail because people think, 'Oh, you'll appreciate this.' Or I get stuff like, 'Hey, this guy's coming to visit from England, you should take him to some strip clubs.' And that's something I would never actually do, but my whole personality is supposedly wrapped around sex." The frankness of the girl reviews recently caught the eye of a Hustler staffer, who approached Muentz to write a feature article -- about people who have sex with stuffed animals. ("It just never happened.") Muentz says, "If anything, being 'The Probe Guy' has probably hurt me. Women figure I'm going to write about them -- but if they say not to, I don't." Indeed, several of his reviews have graphic content taken out at the request of the women involved, and Muentz makes reference to others who refuse to be critiqued at all. (On the other hand, in the new issue he cheerfully prints a pair of photos passed along to him of a woman he admits he doesn't even know.)
But the days of girl reviews are apparently over. At the conclusion of Probe No. 6's installment, he adamantly insists that that will be that. But in the interest of fairness, he plans to print girl-generated "boy reviews" in the next issue, and assuming that the Bay Area's underground punk scene continues to thrive -- and that booze and sex remain readily available commodities -- Muentz's future work looks cut out for him. So despite his present cycle of debt ($40,000 and counting) and his bouts of frustration with the self-publishing life, Muentz doesn't see the end of The Probe coming anytime soon.
Zines remain the one form of writing to which Muentz is committed. "It's a way I can rationalize being almost 30 years old. I can't do the punk-rock, drunk lifestyle without any purpose." While more than a few zine stars are parlaying their skewed worldviews into book deals, Muentz continues trucking, delivering pizza, and occasionally making plans to get his teaching certificate. "I don't necessarily plan on continuing those drunken nights," he asserts, and then, acknowledging the 12-pack of Budweiser sitting patiently beside him, adds, "But I'll probably have another one tonight." And the rest of us will undoubtedly hear about it in Probe No. 7.
The Probe is available by mail for $4 from PO Box 5068, Pleasanton,
