The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (15 page)

It was all straight-up, straight sex. Except for the adjustment of Black’s blackman dick, it was same ole, same ole. Oh, and did I mention that he was really good at it? The best; no one else had ever come close. Wild and strong, he threw me around like I was Tiny Barbie. All was good in the big-dicked hood.

And this normal yet stunning sex went on every night for about three months. Tiny kisses, deep kisses, incredible, creative, passionate, “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone” sex.

I was at the top of my game in all senses. Hit movie, hit series, movies “on the table” for my hiatuses, in my prime, in my zone, madly, deeply in love.

As he began to make love to me on that November night right before Thanksgiving, I was at the pinnacle of love and trust for this man.
I’ve finally done it right
, I thought.
I never imagined life could be this unique and glorious
, and
I’ve finally found the person that I’m willing to do anything for. I’m willing to share the oxygen.

As I was lying there in some lovesick delirium I felt his hand move around my throat.
Whoa, what’s this?
I thought. Then his other hand slipped over my mouth while strategically pinching the air off in my nose. My first reaction was to start laughing; I just couldn’t stop laughing and giggling because I couldn’t imagine it was anything but a joke.

I remember the look in his eyes when he pulled back from me and asked, “Do you think this is funny?”

I immediately became introverted.
Oh, god, had I insulted him? Had I made him feel like I thought he was going to hurt me
?

“Er, uh, well, no, not funny, but it’s uh, no, I don’t think it’s funny.”

He put me in my place, didn’t he?

But he wasn’t hurting me, and we began making love again. His hand went back to my throat, his other hand across my mouth to keep me from breathing. There wasn’t a lot of pressure on my throat—he wasn’t actually choking me—but there was definitely too much pressure.

I kept fighting off laughing, but again I started giggling. I wasn’t afraid at all. I just thought it was funny, that he was kidding me, playing with me. And again he drew back and asked, “Do you think this is funny?”

This time I couldn’t stop laughing, and I said, “Well, it better be funny, or you’re getting off on killing me!” Hahahahahaha.

His eyes looked like he snapped back into his head, like he snapped out of this peculiar trance.

He started laughing, too. “I’m just fucking with you!”

And I believed him.

Of course he was just fucking with me, otherwise I was with someone who liked choking women. Someone who got off on pretending he was killing women. Wow! Phew! That was a close call!

We giggled together and made love and slept like babies.

A few weeks later, there was that hand around my throat again, there was that trancelike look in his eyes, and there was that other hand cutting off my ability to breathe unless I turned my head and gasped for air. And after a few weeks of this, the girl who laughed before had changed. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t feel like laughing, and my thoughts had shifted to
I was too straight before. Too dull, too regular, too mainstream, not hip, not cool, not edgy, not Hollywood.

And that seed that was forming inside my mind, like a malignant tumor, began to grow.

What was once funny and unreal began to be normal, escalating, and varied.

Bizarre sex toys, riding crops, weird role-playing, wigs.

We never spoke about it, and I never queried it. We began fighting, outrageous fights. At first I delighted in the fights, and anything became fair game, except physical abuse.

I felt like a modern-day version of George and Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Our fights became epic! I’d never rolled like this! With other men I was analytical and civil. It seemed so boring compared to flipping tables over, crashing vases, clearing entire table-tops with my arms, screaming at the top of our lungs, and my favorite: bolting out of the house, yelling, “I’m fucking leaving you!”

The more bizarre our fights got, the more perverted our sex life became, including the “rules.” Rule number one: What he did to me couldn’t be done to him. I was tied up. He was not allowed to be. I was choked and “play” suffocated. Never him.

I followed the rules like a good little slave.

His secret weapons were:

1. You’re getting fat.

2. You’re older than I am.

3. Why are you wearing that?

4. Why don’t you do what you did to me two weeks ago?

When I would say, “I don’t remember what we did two weeks ago, could you tell me?” his answer was “No, if you can’t remember what I like, then forget it.” There were many more rules, equally lopsided.

He was insanely jealous of my fame, and he pouted or caused an enormous fight if I didn’t wear hats, wigs, or dark glasses to conceal my identity when we were out.

He didn’t like any of my friends, and he frequently protested that they all hated him. So he set about his agenda of culling me out of my herd so that I belonged only to him.

He made Mickey Rourke in
9
¹
/
₂
Weeks
look like a novice.

I became introverted and diminished. What started as a wild, cool, controversial game was turning into a living hell. Every fight and every weird sexual experience was followed by “I love you, baby, you know that, right? You know how much I love you.”

I would always answer the same thing, “Yes, I love you, too,” with all the zeal of a zombified robot.

My daily routine was to go film. I’d get up in the morning, we would have an intense psychotic fight, and I would get in the car and cry and shake all the way to the studio. My driver, my assistant LeeAnn, would say the same thing every day: “You’ll work it out, you always do.” Ten minutes after I hit the studio, one of us would call the other and beg forgiveness and everything would fall calm again. I would have an amazing day filming, but every day one of the actresses would ask me, “Is someone hurting you?”

“Of course not, who? Who would be hurting me?” was my reply. Each day the actress would ask me this same question, trying desperately to get me to simply take a look at him. She never said his name or mentioned him in particular, just “is someone hurting you?”

But endless flowers, diamond-encrusted crowns, exotic gifts flooded my dressing room and life.

There were hundreds of perverse sexual encounters, all followed by me feeling more and more and more dead. It never dawned on me to tell anyone what was happening, because by then it was “normal.” It was probably what every Hollywood couple did behind closed doors.

The only reason I’m not going into all the perverse details of my life with Black is because this book is not intended to be erotica.

My intention is to alert young girls and not-so-young alike to hold dear that keen antenna that warns you of danger and that it won’t remain keen if you, yourself, chip away at it. I’m sure most thieves don’t start by robbing banks; they start by stealing from their little sister. It’s like acid erosion. The acid’s intention is erosion. The perverted man’s intention is to destroy the woman, second by second, minute by minute, slowly eroding her good sense, her morals, her soul. The target is not to sexually pervert her for the sake of sexual perversion. It is for the sheer pleasure of using sex as the tool to destroy her life.

These men know that they themselves are worthless with no power. They despise creativity, power, talent, and success in others, so they seek to destroy the other because she is a constant reminder of what he is not.

Beware the person who uses sex, drugs, and pain to dominate you. You are signing your own death certificate if you comply. And believe me, death is the goal, no matter how gentle the tiny kisses.

While with Black, I all but destroyed my career. His poison wreaked havoc on my body. I had four concussions, six bouts with pneumonia, injuries and types of accidents I’ve never had before, and countless weird illnesses.

I take full responsibility for my journey into hell. I spent a good three years making amends, rekindling all my friendships and rebuilding my life.

The more responsibility I took for what I had become, the more well I became.

I’m a lucky person. I reestablished my relationships, and they grew stronger than before.

I have not seen “Black” since I walked out the door. The only time I hear about him is in a phone call or letter from one of his unfortunate subsequent victims.

He was not, and is not, unique. He represents all men like himself whose destiny includes the destruction of women.

His existence in my life is only relevant to me helping other women, especially young women. Especially in a society and within a time that glorifies men like these in novels, movies, and television.

Right and wrong do exist in this universe, and the way to prove it is to observe one’s happiness at any given moment. Right decisions create life, love, beauty, and solutions. Wrong ones create chaos, pain, and death, if only of the mind and spirit.

To suppose that men like Christian Black are heroes and role models is as ludicrous to the outcome of a woman’s life as is the notion that Ted Bundy was a nice man, other than killing all those girls.

I think it’s important for women to be aware of men like these and the real damage they cause when they affix themselves to you. They are calculating. They are lifeless. Black’s real name has no importance. He exists only if I let him. He only existed because I allowed him to. I harbor no animosity.

He is invisible to me now.

Why slap them on the wrist with a feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer.

—KATHARINE HEPBURN

The Art of
Closure

P
ARKER IS the man I spent the most years with. I dated him for two years and was married to him for fourteen. During those years, I experienced the most stability, the most peace, the most gentleness, the most learning. Yet Parker is the love of my life whom I know and understand the least. Parker was and to this day remains an enigma.

I was 30 years old, and I’d just been told I was starring in my first movie. It was my first real job as an actress. The night before I began filming
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, I decided to go out and celebrate instead of learning my lines, a very bad habit that has remained with me through my entire career.

I was, of course, on top of the world! I was the James Cameron of women. I was the “Queen of the World!”

My girlfriend Mimi Rogers and I started off at a chic, hip restaurant in West Hollywood called Kathy Gallagher’s.

Mimi and I walked in, dressed to the nines. I’m five foot eight and she’s five-nine. We had no question about “if we were pretty,” and the adrenaline surging through me knowing I was the female lead of a $40 million film in 1981 was, in itself, an aphrodisiac.

Our table wasn’t ready, so Mimi and I perched ourselves at the bar, directly in front of the entrance doors. There was a huge mirror covering the wall in front of us, behind the bar.

We had been sitting there for about 10 minutes when my attention went to the reflection in the mirror. Parker Stevenson, his best friend, Wally, and two blondes were walking in. It was like time stopped. I’d never seen eyes that blue. Parker gave a new meaning to the word “stunner.” I paid no attention to the date he had on his arm. After all, I was 14 hours away from being a movie star. I kept my eyes focused on him, and out of the corner of my mouth I whispered to Mimi, “For him, I would die.”

I don’t think he saw me or noticed me at all. The maitre d’ escorted the quartet to a nearby table. When the maitre d’ led Mimi and me to our table, we had to pass Parker’s. I’ve been told since I was five years old that I have “bedroom eyes,” so I tried to flash the bedroom eyes at Parker when I walked by his table, but he was consumed with Blondie.

Kathy Gallagher’s was the stomping ground of young actors, directors, and pervs. It was a restaurant, but also the gateway to the after-hour hubs, sort of the Stargate to the stars.

Mimi and I were whooping it up with the likes of 10 or 15 well-known movie and TV personalities. Nonstop flirting was the agenda (and remains the agenda to this day in hip Hollywood hot spots). Kathy’s wasn’t a meat market, per se, just a portal to the next location.

This guy heads for our table. It’s Wally, Parker’s best friend. “We’re going to the Daisy after dinner, if you girls wanna join in, come on by.” Wally wasn’t talking to me, either; he knew one of the other girls at our table.

I casually asked my new “connection” after Wally left, “So, um, who’s that guy with that guy who just left the table?” To this day Parker doesn’t know that I asked about him.

“Oh, that’s Parker Stevenson. You know who Parker Stevenson is, right?”

“Yes! He was the star of a John Knowles novel-turned-feature-film.”

“You idiot!!! He’s one of the Hardy Boys!” she said.

“I know that,” I quipped. But I didn’t really. I remembered him from the movie
A Separate Peace
in a riveting performance as the troubled, introverted Gene. And I remembered trying to decide which WASP I had a bigger crush on—Gene or Phineas.

“So! You guys want to swing by the Daisy after dinner?” the blonde clone of all blonde California bombshell clones asked.

I gave my typical noncommittal answer, “Maybe.” Maybe? Maybe, my ass! If I could have had Scotty beam me up to the Daisy I would have already been waiting there an hour early to greet Parker Stevenson at the door!

Wow! I knew it was going to take some hooch to relax me a little. Take the edge off, cool my jets, whatever you wanna call it. So I began drinking. It worked, I got a little buzz, and my fake confidence started to kick in. About two hours later, over walked Wally, Parker, and their two blondies. “So, you guys gonna come to the Daisy?” Wally asked our table’s spokesperson. She replied, “Yes, I think we might stop by.” It seemed Parker made eye contact with me, yet because my eyes were slightly glassy by then, it was hard to tell. But maybe he thought my bedroom eyes were ultrabedroomy . . .