‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (3 page)

In high school, I had a head for being organized and being in control. I got a challenge out of being industrious, and remember I used to make these friendship bracelets, and sit out on 8th Street and 6th Avenue and sell them. I would make $800 to $1000 selling them because I would go buy a huge plastic thing full of ones that were already made.Then I would sit on the street and make my own, in addition, and people passing by would think I’d made all of them, and be that much more compelled to buy one from me. I’d get all the Jersey people and tourists — the B&T (Bridge and Tunnel) crowd. I could sell quite a few in a given sitting. When I got to the end of my senior year, it was hard to figure out what direction I wanted to head in as far as college because my mother had always wanted me to become a lawyer. She preached at me so much about it that it almost convinced me that was what I wanted. Usually, if a parent says something loud enough times, the kid comes to believe it and she filled my head with enough of that about becoming an attorney that I started out with that in mind. She was also so busy putting me down socially, like saying the only people who carried pagers were prostitutes and drug dealers that I didn’t know what I wanted. No matter what I did at that point, it wasn’t ever good enough for my mom, so maybe I was motivated on some level to become an attorney to try and please her? I don’t know, but I headed off into my first year of college without a fucking clue personally as to what I wanted to study. On top of that, my freshman year was spent at Schiller International University in London, where my mom sent me to get away from New York.

She didn’t want me to be around boys with the kind of freedom that college can provide. To her credit, there weren’t many metal-heads at Schiller — so I started using Hit Parader Magazine’s Penpal section to write back and forth with guys. In London, I lived with my mom’s sister, so I was still under a pretty watchful eye anyway. Schiller University was an international university, with campuses in Germany, France, and so forth. I really liked it, and did really well in my classes, and liked everyone, but it was kind of weird for me because there weren’t any Americans, and definitely weren’t any long haired men. So I just stayed in school for the most part. My best friends were these girls named Nasrin and Rosita, the latter of whom was from the Fiji Islands. I also eventually met these two headbangers Patrick and Michael, two brothers from New York. Anyway, it was not your average freshman year — there were no sororities, no keg parties, and because I stayed with my aunt, I was pretty much under constant surveillance. She wasn’t as protective as my mom, but it was still restrictive. After a while, I got homesick for New York and knew I belonged back there, and wanted to travel to Brazil (every experience there was the BEST) as well. I think the event that finally sent me back to NY was my mother coming to England to visit me and staying for a month, and going as far as to escort me to class each day. She would ride to school with me on the trolley, sit in the back of class basically chaperone me. I figured I had a better chance of avoiding that kind of thing repeating itself if I went to school back in the States.

After my freshman year, I came back to New York and enrolled in Columbia University, where I finished out my undergraduate degree. I wanted to go to an Ivy League school, figuring it might shut my mom up, which it didn’t, but I had no regrets about the school. I had already taken some AP courses at Columbia while I was still in high school, so it was a pretty comfortable environment for me already. So when I got settled in, I made my major Business and my minor French. I had some really nerdy classes — Philosophy, French and German, and International Politics. I was there 3 ½ years, and despite rumors, I didn’t blow anyone for my grades. I probably didn’t fit in very well with the traditional Columbia mold because they didn’t have very many headbangers and by that time, I was a big-time rocker. My best friend there was another headbanger named Elise Carter, who was a film student. My first acting job actually was doing an independent film for her that we shot in the middle of freezing winter in Times Square wearing a mini-skirt, which was a lot of fun. Of course, my mother insisted I stay living at home while I went to college, which considering I enrolled at 17, and was a sophomore by 18 I guess wasn’t that hard to understand in one light. So I took the train to school every day, and you’d be on crack to think my mom backed off while I was in college. I guess she wanted to keep more an eye on me than ever because she was intent on molding me into what she was professionally, so at first I thought about majoring in Business Law, but didn’t want to.

On the side, I started modeling, did some small ads for Benetton, some catalog work, but my main focus was always school. I wanted to run a business, but my mom really didn’t like anything I had to say about that idea. So in a minor way, modeling was an escape of sorts for me, because it also gave me what money I had since my mom kept most of my money from me at that time in an obvious attempt to limit my freedom even further. Another escape of mine was going to art museums, which dated back to when I was a child. My favorite artists are Van Gogh, Monet, and Pissarro, and I would always be making things — be it jewelry, or those friendship bracelets — whatever, as a creative outlet, which I would also sell for extra money. At one point I bought these Pennaflax Water Color pencils, and drew things that blended into others, I guess trying to imitate my heroes. It never turned into anything more than fun, but I wasn’t really raised to be competitive, I was raised to be a shark. My mom had raised me to always reserve my comments toward other people’s feelings, for instance, someone’s musical tastes. If they disagree with yours, you don’t tell them that, you just say it’s not for me. She also raised me to always be independent, never to rely on a man for anything, to always have independence financially. Basically my mom brought me up to never rely on anyone for anything. In spite of her Nazi teenage parenting dictatorship, I admired her as a woman for being very independent, strong, smart and beautiful; she kept herself in really great shape, and was a lot of fun to do things with. She really took me to cool places as a kid, be it Connecticut, or the Hamptons, or museums, plays, and so forth. I was pretty sheltered in terms of men, which gave me a dangerous naivety when I got involved with Dick Pelicanose, but I was very enlightened from a young age on all things cultural, which drove me to experience every artistic thing I could throughout my formative years. Some of them I tried to turn commercial, or into little businesses — for instance my aforementioned friendship bracelet business — but others were just in the spirit of the whole idea.

All throughout college, even after I was enrolled at Columbia, I still traveled, such that I still went to London, Paris, Brazil — everywhere. I was still very shy in college though, at least on campus, because I didn’t fit in with the typical Columbia mold; they were mostly corn-fed pieces of shit who think they are hot because of where they go to school. Also, I hated the school’s campus because I felt it was a totally artificial environment in relation what New York was really about, and for example, where NYU’s campus, by contrast, was basically the East Village, Columbia had a very model-like design to theirs. You don’t get to see what’s out there, so I gravitated toward the headbangers and the odd ball students who were clearly feeling the way I was about the campus, and believe me, we all stood out. One of my best friends in college, for example, was in the Russian Mafia, but was a really cool person. Going to college in New York I would say was a healthy thing overall as opposed to doing it all in Europe. I definitely found myself in New York, but I also didn’t in many ways because my mother worked so hard to define me in her terms.Thankfully, even at that age, I was determined to live life on my own.

and her Grandfather; Jasmin as a baby on the beach in St Croix US Virgin Islands; Jasmin as an infant with her favorite stuffed animal; Jasmin as a baby.