Slade Fiero Fixes Realdolls, Men’s Lives

Meet Slade Fiero, the world’s foremost repairman of the Realdoll, those extremely lifelike sex dolls that Howard Stern and his crew are always boinking on his show. They look about as close to a real woman as you can get–except that they’re perfect–and are always ready to get down, so not surprisingly, they cost a fortune. A “standard female” can run you about $7,000. Forget wanting one with hermaphroditic parts or something. (Hey, it takes all kinds.) So, when they get damaged, or “sick” as their lovers like to call them, you don’t just go buy a new one. That’s where Slade comes in.

In his suburban Davis, California home, Slade spends his time with the lights low (he sees better that way), puffing on weed, spraying the giz out of other people’s dolls in the bathtub and listening to “Goodbye Horses.” (Just kidding about the song, but the rest is true.) Fixing these “blems,” as they’re known in the doll trade, turns Slade a comfortable profit at least until lately when orders have slowed to a trickle thanks to the economy. Details visited him in his den of silicone to hear his tales of ick and wonder.

“If you care for [your Realdoll], if you treat it right, you can crank her knees up to her shoulders and bang away at that doll with good hard intercourse and come out shining. But clean her out,” Fiero says, his voice rising with indignation. “Clean her off. If you’ve got a hairy chest, you’re going to leave hairs all over her. If you’ve got a cat, she’s going to pick up cat hair. You want to take care of what you’ve got.”

Seriously. We didn’t need to know that. Indeed Fiero’s obsession with the physical form seems to hover somewhere between coroner and serial killer. The whole reason he got into repairing Realdolls is because he was an avid collector of animal remains and decided to take it to the next level and get a mannequin. But he realized mannequins are too static for his liking. That’s when friends told him about the Realdoll. He bought a used one (ugh) on ebay and set about fixing her up. The story calls to mind scenes from Silence Of The Lambs.

When the doll arrived, its fiberglass jaw was broken. “I’m not afraid of much,” he says. “So I got out tools and knives. And then I cut her open. At that point in my life I had already participated in 15 human autopsies”—yet another friend worked at a coroner’s lab—”so I made an incision up the back of her head, pulled all of her skin forward, and then started removing it from the skull.” Fiero fixed the jaw and patched up her head. He was so proud of his surgical mastery that he put pictures of the “RealDoll autopsy” on his website. “I did her face up really nice,” he says, “and that doll was beautiful when I got done.”

A star may have been born, but now we can’t get this out of our heads. To add to this crazy tale is the fact that Fiero had a parachuting mishap in 1995 that left him, amongst other things, without the ability to get a natural erection. (Viagra and the like still work.) We say mishap because it was no accident. He decided to wait until he was only 1000 feet in the air before he released his shoot just to see what would happen. The emergency shoot opened, getting caught in the other and rendering both worthless. Fiero hit the ground and fucked his shit all up.

“My back was busted. I was paralyzed all over the place. I had tubes and wires comin’ out of me.” He could walk, eventually, but only by twisting his torso around so that the muscles of his upper body forced his legs forward. Other things he could not do. “My dick didn’t work, and I couldn’t perform sexually,” he says. This, of course, lends a layer of irony to Fiero’s life. “He’s able to repair the dolls,” muses Elena Dorfman, [a photographer who documented that world in her 2005 book Still Lovers], “in a way that he is not able to repair himself. I think that that is his way of maybe working through his own stuff.”

THE LOVE DOCTOR [Details]
Image [CoverDoll]