Girlvert: A Porno Memoir (19 page)

“Tyler, are you doing heroin? Because if you are, I am really, really fucking mad at you. You know your real father and my mom are junkies. Their lives are fucked up because of it! Please, Tyler, don’t do it.” My screaming voice bounced off of the sides of the buildings in the middle of his apartment complex.

“Shhh! I’m not! I’m okay, please. Don’t worry. I am partying a little too much, but I’m fine. I’m working and I’m trying to get my shit together. Please.”

“Do you promise me?”

“Yes. I’m fine. I miss you. A lot.”

“I miss you, too.”

We stammered on and on with half-hearted sentiments: I wasn’t happy, and neither was Tyler, since we’d split. We were happier together. Maybe we could have worked it out. Maybe Tyler just needed to get his whoring out of his system. I just couldn’t say the truth. I was a jealous bitch who would never be able to get past his indiscretions. The reality was that I had a new boyfriend and was way too involved with him to turn back. Tyler looked at me with sad, tired brown eyes. He still made my heart sink when I looked up at them.

I asked, “Do you have any of the money you said you would pay me back?”

“Oh, yeah. I wanted to pay you a big chunk of it, but I just haven’t been able to. I don’t have it right now. I’m going to pay you, though. I mean it.”

He may have meant what he said, but he didn’t act on it. The longer he took, the angrier I grew. The money was important to me now. I was still spending at least a thousand a week on coke, just for myself. All of my spending habits had gotten out of hand since we’d broken up. I went out every night and shopping every day. After Prague, my porno work started slowing down. I started to panic about how I was going to keep it all up.

Kris and I were in my bedroom, sitting on the floor. We had the coke plate lying on the carpet with us. I did line after line, trying to figure out how I was going to pay Tyler’s five hundred dollar phone bill, which was in my name.

“What can I do? There’s no way for me to make him pay it. He shouldn’t just be able to get away with it.” I wiped some excess powder off the end of my nose and reached for my vodka tonic.

Kris said, “You should file small claims against him. My friend did it and she got a judge to order payment for her case. It was easy. You just go down and file. And it’s cheap, too.” I took his advice and filed a small claims suit against Tyler. All it required was thirteen dollars and a drive to the Van Nuys Courthouse. Another friend suggested I contact Judge Judy. I went to the website but didn’t find any information about how to contact the show. It seemed too far-fetched anyway.

Then, two days after I filed the claim, I picked up the phone at home and it was a producer for the
Judge Mathis Show
in Chicago. She somehow knew I had recently filed a suit and asked if I would like to come on the show for a ruling. I couldn’t believe it. The producer said that she could have me on in a month. When I told her that Tyler and I were porn stars, she told me she could book us in a week.

The producers took the courtesy of calling Tyler and telling him that he was being sued. He would never have consented to going on television to air his dirty laundry if they hadn’t mentioned they would pay the settlement of the case. If he lost, the money wouldn’t come out of his pocket. He was sold because he knew he would lose.

The
Judge Mathis Show
flew us out in less than a week. I was almost flat broke. My porno dollars were being spent as fast as I could fuck for them. It wasn’t just the principle I was after now, it was cash. My landlord, Pro Trusion, was kicking me out of the condo. He callously delivered the notice, giving me thirty days to get out. It was early November. Porno was shutting down for the holidays. I was screwed.

Thank god for this show, I thought, for saving my ass. Not only was I suing Tyler for the phone bills and the loan for his apartment deposit, but for another unpaid loan: the two thousand dollars his dishonest mother, Cheryl, had borrowed. Because Tyler had told me to give her the money or it meant I didn’t love him, it was emotional ransom. It turns out that the money didn’t even go to Cheryl’s mortgage. She used it to buy expensive gifts for her daughters and herself. I held Tyler responsible.

On the day of the show, I sat in a greenroom for the plaintiffs. Tyler was in another one designated for defendants. There was a swarm of young, talkative, attractive producers who gathered information from us. It was their job to get our stories and twist them into entertaining TV. They gossiped back and forth, telling me what Tyler was saying about me in the other room. By the time it was our turn to go on air I was exceedingly fired up and pissed off.

When I watch the tape of the show now, it’s silly. At the time, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. I was hot, ready to take the legal system by storm. My hair was freshly dyed black to get rid of those awful blond streaks. My makeup was perfect and my outfit was a new cream-colored suit jacket and miniskirt from Bebe. I thought I was something else. Tyler surprised me by wearing slacks and a slightly wrinkled jacket. I expected a dirty tee shirt and jeans. His eyes were barely open. There were soot-colored circles underneath them.

Tyler had brought his new junky girlfriend as a character witness for the show. It was the first time I ever saw her. She was a mess. Her hair was clipped cheaply in a bun and had obviously not been brushed for days. She wore a baggy hooded sweatshirt and jean skirt. The outfit was not what you should show up to court in unless you wanted to say, “I don’t really give a fuck about anything.”

Tyler and I both had a chance to plead our stories to the Honorable Judge Mathis, who started the proceeding by asking, “You all real freaks, or do you just play the role?”

“He started to fall in love with girls that he would do scenes with!”

“We did stuff off camera, before we even started. We were crazy!”

“In our business, you have the opportunity to make a lot of money. And he chooses to spend it on drugs instead!”

“She partied her ass off, too! Oh, sorry, Your Honor. She partied a lot.”

The porno, the women, the parties, and the love story, all summed up for the man before he deliberated. It was a joke. Everyone looked foolish. Fortunately, I was used to doing way more outrageous things on camera for money. Being on a mainstream television program yelling at my ex-boyfriend is actually one of the tamest moments in my video history.

The ruling was in my favor. I was awarded the sum I’d loaned Tyler, plus what he owed for the phone bill, but not the two thousand dollars I loaned to his mother. Mathis said I had to sue Cheryl directly to get that back. Fat chance. She lived in Texas, and I was never going to go back there. I didn’t see Tyler or his girlfriend after our appearance. It was several months before I saw him on a set, then years went by before I saw him again.

The last time I saw Tyler was at a bukkake shoot in 2006. I was there to mix up a bowl of cum in a blender for another girl to drink. I didn’t even touch a cock that day, just mixed the seed feed. Tyler was one of the sixty guys present to jack off into the bowl. There is no lower you can go in porn than bukkake guy. I was shocked to see the person I used to be in love with look so terrible. He was weathered, the constant drugs and hard living having caught up to him. It was extremely sad. I was high on coke and drunk when I got to the scene. When I saw him, I was too numb to feel what I truly felt for Tyler. I was sorry for my own share of the dealings when we broke up. Perhaps I hadn’t acted as compassionately as I could have because I was in my own downward spiral. We were still a lot alike, but somehow I was getting away with it. Tyler had begun to pay the price. My penance was still on its way.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Ass Cream Pie

A
fter
my appearance on the
Judge Mathis Show
, I moved out of the condo in Tarzana. I found another apartment in Hollywood, right at the bottom of the hills. Technically, it was in Hollywood Hills. I was going to be much happier there, living alone, but it would take some time. Until then, I’d never lived alone in my life. I looked at Pro Trusion’s sudden eviction as a blessing in disguise. Living in the place that Tyler and I once shared was too painful, even after I’d taken in a roommate. It was time to move on, geographically and otherwise.

But moving couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was on the latter half of my second year in porn and the job offers had come to a halt. I’d left Nelson and Hannah’s agency, and things were slow. It was the holiday season and nobody was shooting. I could barely pay my new rent and deposit. The savings account I’d started for my porno money was empty. In addition to the rent, I had to buy Christmas gifts. Car payments and insurance didn’t go away either just because the porn industry gets slow. Soliciting myself to directors and producers was never my best quality. I’d had Nelson to do that for me for over a year. Then we had a final argument on the phone and came to the conclusion that I would move forward alone. I was happy about it. Nelson, already a tyrant, was turning into a cold-hearted pimp. I couldn’t handle fighting with him anymore, especially over the people I would fuck, and for how much.

My self-esteem was burning low. I was desperate for someone to care about me for something other than my place in a sex scene. I thought that person was Kris, but I didn’t even know who I was anymore. In less than two years, I’d done over a hundred scenes. Tyler was gone from my life. I thought I’d be happier without him. Then it all started to sink in. Everything about my life before I got into the business was gone. Where were the traces of Oriana Rene Small outside of porn? I didn’t draw or paint anymore, just covered myself in cocaine and makeup.

That December, a director from Anabolic named Marco called me. He’d called three times over the course of a few months about the same thing: He wanted me to be in his movie called
Ass Cream Pies
. It was a series he directed. I’d steadily declined. It was an anal movie where the girl gets fucked really hard in the butt, followed by a cum shot in the ass that she has to push out for the camera. At the very end, the guys throw cream pies in her face. The offer hadn’t been appealing to me when I had other work. Now I had nothing else. The scene paid twelve hundred dollars. When Marco called that third time, it was like he was psychic. Of course I said yes.

I was deeply ashamed of myself for doing this movie. The shame was related to my desperation for money.

Where had the money gone? I’d been making several thousand dollars a week, but I hadn’t saved any of it. I was a total failure with my finances. I always thought the good times would never end.

People had warned me about getting “shot out,” meaning that everyone had shot me already and I had become old news. I routinely performed the most hardcore scenes, so no one was waiting anxiously for me to do my next anal movie as if it were a rarity. I was becoming yesterday’s porno girl. My motto getting into porn was, “I don’t care about this business or my life, it’s fucked up anyway.” That attitude helped put me where I was. I’d imagined dying young and burning out before my time, a tragic hero, a mystery. That dream never came true because I wasn’t being honest with myself. I didn’t really want to die. I did care about my life.
I am fucked up, but I will probably live through it
, I thought. This is what doing
Ass Cream Pies
was trying to tell me. If I don’t do a better job of watching out for myself, I will end up doing worse and more desperate things to survive.

Instead of taking the job as a clear warning sign toward future disappointment, I wallowed in self-pity. The night before my shoot, I drank and did several grams of cocaine. Same old story. I blamed the porno business for tossing me aside. I’d become the jaded twenty-two year old porno star that the business had used and then tragically forgotten. That’s why I have to resort to doing such a degrading scene, I told myself. My drug-and-alcohol abuse wasn’t the problem, because it got me through such difficult times. Right.

I showed up at the Anabolic office for makeup at 8:00 a.m. All of my coke was gone and I hadn’t slept, so I was falling asleep in the makeup chair. My nose was a crusty, red scab. I reeked of cigarettes. All of my limbs were stiff. That’s what these people deserve, I thought, a total mess. I hated the idea of this movie, so why not come to set as a zombie.

As ridiculous as it seems to me now, the real reason I was so against
Ass Cream Pies
was because of the actual pies, the dessert food. Marco was a nice enough director. He always gave me compliments. The two men doing the double penetration were decent. I was used to the rough scenes that Anabolic commanded in their movies. Even the double internal pop shot was fine with me. I never thought about diseases. I didn’t worry about catching AIDS because everyone was tested. There’s a certain amount of blindness you absolutely must develop when you perform sex for a living. I’d honed that skill after doing two gang bangs with multiple guys cumming inside my ass and in my mouth. It was just a bad time for me to get pies thrown in my face. If my sense of worth had been a little higher, I would have had the humility to be able to laugh at myself. Humility and humiliation are two very different things. I didn’t see myself as human. I was a porn star. I was supposed to be sexy, period. That had become my entire identity. The crazy fun was fading and things were feeling serious. Jokes in sex scenes confused me. I felt like everyone would laugh at me and look down on me for getting pies thrown in my face, like some clown. As an object, I would decrease in value to men. I couldn’t have that happen. My value to men was everything.

Part of the destruction of my self-esteem was slowly resulting from my relationship with Kris. He’d become my full-time boyfriend and we spent every night together at one of our apartments. Like most courtships, when we first got together I only saw his good side. We went on trips together to Cancun, Miami, and Chicago. Then, when it came time for me to get back to doing my scenes in the real world of porn, Kris showed his oppressive side. We would get all coked out the night before I had to perform, and he’d spend hours saying things like, “I just wish you didn’t have to do this. I love you. I want you to be with me, and me only. I don’t know if I can deal with this for much longer. I love you and I want you to quit, but I know you can’t. It sucks. This is hard for me. I can’t stand seeing you fuck these other disgusting porno dudes. It kills me. When are you going to start making plans? You can’t do this forever. I can’t do this. I don’t know. You’ve got to do something else soon. I can’t take it.”

It sounds sweet, but it’s a two-way street: Kris wanted me all to himself while maintaining the right to fuck whoever he wanted on camera. Hypocritical possessiveness. Kris worked in porno, I had met him in porno, the first conversation we’d ever had was about him hiring me to suck his cock on camera. He was making me feel there was something terribly wrong with me for doing porn, a new reason to hate myself, even though it was fine for him to do so. Doing scenes started to make me sad, like I was a horrible person who couldn’t get my life together, hurting the one person who truly loved me.

Kris wasn’t exactly trying to help me for me, or solely for our romance. He had after all hired me to fuck other guys in his own movies. But suddenly “he cared about me too much to see me do this” because of his own insecurity. Kris is one of the most insecure people I’ve ever known, and if he couldn’t get his self-esteem up, he’d whittle mine down to his level. Early in our relationship, I exuded confidence, even after Tyler had neglected me. Kris must have been attracted to that, but he somehow turned jealous along the way, and the pressure wore me down.

I didn’t tell Kris that the scene I was going to do was for a movie called
Ass Cream Pies
. He would have made me feel awful about it. No way would he have found it humorous. I was too depressed about my life at the time to see the humor in any of it, but I find it funny now.

Marco and the two male performers didn’t mind that I was wasted. Marco just laughed at me. He took the glamour stills and had to coax me into opening my eyes the whole time. He was kind. I was so out of it I couldn’t hold in my stomach or smile without grimacing. The dilapidated house we shot at belonged to Voltron, my old acquaintance from the
Pissmops
and
Meatholes
days. Voltron was drunk at 10:00 a.m., same as me. As soon as I walked in the door he handed me a Bud Light. I cracked it open with my weak, shaky fingers and chugged it down. I asked for two more cans before I went into the bathroom to do my enema.

I hadn’t eaten in at least twenty-four hours, so I wasn’t expecting much to come out of my intestines. The bathroom was filthy. I didn’t want to spend more time in there than I needed to. There was toilet paper all over the floor. It was dark and the light bulb was yellowing, about to burn out. I didn’t see any shit on the floor, but maybe only because the light was dim. It smelled like dirty, stagnant creek water and mold. There was a disturbing absence of soap. When soap isn’t available, people who use the toilet are not washing their hands.

Voltron owned a nicely built, Spanish-style home. He’d destroyed it. The walls were smeared with grime. The lawn was overgrown, garbage in it. The white driveway had a couple of beaten-up cars and was covered in oil stains. None of the windows were broken, nor the doors, but they had to be next. Or maybe they were replacements. In the corners of the living room, where we were shooting, were piles of old used baby wipes. The hardwood floors had a layer of dirt evenly distributed throughout every room. I didn’t go in the kitchen because I didn’t need to. The beer I was drinking was warm and sitting next to the front door.

My scene started as if someone had pulled the trigger to sound a race. I was getting face-fucked by my two male counterparts, and they had a standard to keep for their company. Anabolic movies continued to have the hardest fucking known to woman. I was just a piece of warm flesh for them to pummel with their cocks. I knew the role. I was good at this.

I have to say, when the sex was happening, I felt better. I forgot all of the cry-baby shit. Getting pounded in the ass is very empirical. I was in that moment and nowhere else. Worrying about paying my next GapCard bill was no longer necessary. All I had to do was get my brains and ass fucked out. The sex itself wasn’t what dehumanized me. It actually made me feel more of a human being, while simultaneously connecting me deeply to an animal world. The dehumanizing happened outside of the scene, at home, in the hands of the ones I loved.

Therapeutic is not the right word—I don’t want to sugarcoat it—but it did sober me up. The men grabbed me by the hair and yanked me around during the scene. One fucked like a robot. The other actually had some talent. When I say talent, I mean that he was spontaneous. I think porno performers have talent when they bring something unique to the sex scene rather than memorizing some moves that got positive reactions in the past and doing nothing more than employing them over and over again. To be captivating isn’t a formula. You either have it or you don’t. No one can teach you how to be a standout porno star. It is way different than being good in bed. They are two completely different forms of sex.

Marco couldn’t wait for the pies to get thrown. If I were in his position, I guess I would have been just as antsy. Voltron handed me a beer and I downed it. It wasn’t bad at all. The buildup to being made fun of was the worst part—not the fucking, but the anticipation of humiliation. I left that day with my rent money but without my dignity. I started to feel really bad when I thought about how Kris would respond to the scene. The movie would come out later, so I put off telling him about it. I would deal with his criticism then.

You cannot hide from what you do when you’re doing porn. What I’ve done is out there for the world to view. Porno is a brutally honest job.