The Other Hollywood (65 page)

He just seemed way too fucked up for me.

JILL KELLY
:
I’d been at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and I was driving through Laurel Canyon. Cal was on the phone, going on and on. I’m the kind of person who is strong on the phone, but as soon as I see the person, I melt. So I knew I didn’t want to see him. And he was like, “I’m coming over there right now.”

By this time I was home. So I said, “No, I’m leaving.”

Cal was like, “If you don’t see me, you’re going to find me dead on
your doorstep.” Of course, I was like, “Yeah, you know,
whatever.
” Called my mom, and called my best friend, and they were like, “Don’t listen to him. He pulls shit like this all the time.”

HENRI PACHARD
:
I’m a lousy fuck on camera, and I’m a lousy fuck
off
camera. What’s the big deal? I’m not gonna kill myself over it!

But Cal wasn’t getting enough bookings to keep up with his lifestyle. And poverty is just nature’s way of telling a man he’s in the wrong line of work. I mean, if you’re broke all the time, it’s time to change jobs.

JILL KELLY
:
I had never been scared of Cal, but for some reason—I don’t know why—I was scared. And Buck Adams called me and said, “Get out of the house.”

And I’m like, “Why?”

Buck was like, “He’s coming there to kill you and kill himself.”

And I was just like, I totally would never expect that. So I just acted like I wasn’t there—because I didn’t want to see Cal—because then I’d melt and say, “Whatever you want.”

And then I heard this big crash. I thought it was a broken window.

But it was a gunshot.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Apparently Cal had called her on the cell phone; there was a trail of people Cal called on his way to Jill’s. And when he got to her apartment, she wouldn’t answer the door. I heard he was screaming at the window for her—and then he shot himself.

JILL KELLY
:
I waited a few minutes. Then, finally, I said, “Fuck it. I’m going out there.” I locked my house up, walked down the steps, and there was Cal, lying in the gutter. It was sprinkling, and I’m just like, “Get up.” And I laughed because I totally thought he was just like…I’m like, “Give me a break,” you know?

Then, all of a sudden, you realize—when I first saw the blood, I thought it was from the magic store. And I saw part of his brain, and I thought it was, like, a chewed-up hot dog. But I went to nursing school, so I’m listening and looking for a pulse, and I felt nothing. I lifted up his sweater, thinking, “He can’t hold his breath that long.” Your mind just plays all these tricks on you.

RON JEREMY
:
Cal had always been insecure. But to go to his girlfriend’s house and threaten to kill her and then blow his own brains out—why couldn’t I have seen it?

JILL KELLY
:
The last thing Cal told me was, “It’s the story of the boy who cried wolf.” And I swear to God, I didn’t know what that story was until after he died.

HENRI PACHARD
:
There was an awful lot of talk about Cal. There was a big article written about it in the
New Yorker
by this girl Susan Faludi. I still got her card somewhere. She interviewed me; she interviewed a lot of people. She was kind of cool, but she seemed really scared because she took her assignment so seriously. Anyway, Cal killed himself while she was in the middle of her story. Susan probably got a phone call from the
New Yorker
, “Write about this Cal Jammer kid. Randy Potes.”

“Why?”

“The guy killed himself.”

“So?”

“He was a porno actor.”

“Cool.”

“You know, just rewrite, change everything.”

Then the whole article became about Cal’s suicide, ha, ha, ha.

JILL KELLY
:
What about the rumor that I had a guy in the house? Oh, my God, that’s the funniest thing in the whole fucking world. I swear on my life, I was the most loyal person—I’d had only slept with three guys in my whole life before then, but many girls. I’d heard rumors that I was a big swinger. It was so retarded. It was just insane to hear some of that shit.

There’s so much that I will never, ever tell. I’ll take to my fucking grave what really happened with Cal. Let them say whatever they want, you know?

TIM CONNELLY
:
Cal was like a lot of guys in the business. They’re attracted to the girls in the business because they’re very sexual, open, outgoing women. Then you connect with one of them, and you have something a little bit deeper, and suddenly they can’t be a stripper; they can’t be a porn star. I mean, I went through it myself.

JILL KELLY
:
Cal’s cousin did not like me from the get-go. When we got married, she would ask about his ex-girlfriend right in front of me, you know? But she and his little brother came up to me at the funeral and said, “You know, Cal was bound to do it. If it wasn’t with you, it was gonna be somebody else. It was just a matter of time.” But most of Cal’s family treated me like I was the reason he did it. And his family took everything that Cal and I worked for.

People in the industry were hard on me. And at that time, honestly, I was like a zombie. It was like I didn’t care. All I cared about was making money and getting things for my family—because I was gonna kill myself. I couldn’t live with the guilt. I was just making sure everybody was secure. It was really weird. But I guess the thing that helped me was that the harder people were on me, the more I tried.

HENRI PACHARD
:
Susan Faludi wanted to go to Cal’s funeral. So I picked her up, took her to the funeral, and she met all these porno people—guys and girls and wannabes. You know, “Hey, let’s go to Cal’s funeral!”

The only reason I went was that Susan wanted to go. But about half of the industry was at that funeral, as if they felt some call. I mean,
all of a sudden
. Nobody particularly liked working with Cal because they knew it was gonna be a slow process. Yet they showed up, out of some kind of defiance. “We gotta do this—stand up and be counted for. This is one of our own.”

There’d always been a girl that killed herself, but there’d never been a guy before. Maybe that’s why all the guys showed up, from the beginners to the old veterans. It touched them close to home. It’s interesting—that never came up.

I don’t remember that being in the
New Yorker,
either.

LOS ANGELES
1996–1997

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I was practicing a gig at a local titty bar, making a few bucks. I liked performing at this club; I was really having a good time. It was run by some biker gang, and the bouncer would walk you to your car. So that night he walked me to my car, but I had forgotten my stash—I was still using dope. I went back in the club, and on the way out he said, “Do you want me to walk you out again?”

I said “No, that’s okay.”

And there was a guy out in the parking lot. He said, “Hey lady, do you want some money?”

He was from the Escondido nightclub down the street. He thought I was a hooker, you know? He knew my name and everything; he had seen the show.

TRICIA DEVERAUX (PORN STAR)
:
I grew up in a small town a couple hours outside of Chicago. I was brought up very strict. I wasn’t allowed to date. I wasn’t allowed to go out with friends. I was very into my studies. I mean, I never rebelled as a teenager, ever. I did what I was supposed to do—when I was supposed to do it. I went to a private Catholic junior high. I was actually brought up being told that you should not have sex before marriage. Just the normal values of Midwestern life.

I went to college in the Midwest, too, and then finished my bachelor’s degree out in Missouri. Then went to one year of medical school. I met Patrick in college, but he was never actually a sweetheart. I met him during a difficult point in my life, and he helped get me through it. So I got
married to Patrick really young, before medical school—that was a mistake.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I could tell this guy was kind of a wacko-crazed-fan type. He kept asking if I wanted money, and I said, “No, no.”

Then he put his foot in between me and the car door. I figured, foot or no foot, I’m driving. I didn’t think twice about it; I just drove away.

I went to the 7-Eleven—and the same guy approached me in the parking lot. And again, I didn’t think twice about it. Why? Because I had to get in the fucking door to get a shot of dope in me. I knew I had one waiting at home.

Tunnel vision, right?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Right before I started medical school, Patrick got a job as a bouncer in a strip club. I was like, “How could you do something like that?” I had never had any sort of exposure to stripping. One of my older sorority sisters had been a stripper, and her parents said what a horrible thing she did!

So I was very angry. But eventually I said, “Well, I want to see this place. I want to make sure this isn’t some horrible, dingy sex club.”

So Patrick brought me in to see it, and I got along really well with all the girls—the waitresses and dancers—and I ended up going there once in a while to visit Patrick. But I would talk to the girls instead.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I get home—and this psycho crazed fan must have gotten in through the front door. I came in and closed the garage door, and as I walked up he pushed in behind me—attacked me—and this guy and I went at it for a while.

I fought this guy for fifteen minutes without a bell, you know what I mean? It was a real tussle. I just kept kicking stuff over; I thought if I broke enough things and made enough noise, someone would call the police. It was, like, three o’clock in the morning. He tried to rape me. He strangled me, broke my larynx, and broke my nose. Really fucked me up bad.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Everybody at the strip club was always saying, “You should try out for the amateur contests! Why don’t you do it?”

I’m like, “Oh my gosh!” I was really homely in high school. I was very plain. I never thought I was ugly, although at one point I was kind of chunky, had bad acne, braces—so definitely not pretty. Even at my best in high school, I was never pretty. Then I finally started to blossom a little bit in college, and by the time I walked into the strip club I was more the pretty-girl-next-door type.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Finally he hit me, and I passed out—I woke up choking on my own blood. I knew my throat had been broken, and I couldn’t swallow. I said to myself, “Oh my God, this is it. I’m going to fucking die.”

Then I thought, “This is fucked up, man. After all the shit I’ve done, I ain’t going out because of this motherfucker!”

I rolled him over toward my weight pile and picked up a weight. It was pitch black; I was on the floor, and he was on top of me, strangling me—and I thought,
if I hit him, fine. If I hit me, fine.
At least I’ll take myself out, you know?

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Eventually—it took a few months—I actually did the amateur contest, and I won. I probably danced to Metallica—I’m sure it was Metallica. I was really nervous, but I’d gotten to be really good friends with one of the bartenders, and he just told me, “Any time you get nervous just look over at me.” I wore glasses back then, and when I took my glasses off to go onstage, I couldn’t see him. But I looked back in his direction, and I knew he was there, and I just was like, you know, okay.

It actually helped not to be able to see the audience because I couldn’t see them staring at me. I could see there were people there, but I didn’t see their eyes focus on me, you know? And I could hear the applause. So I got all of the good things and none of the stuff that made me nervous, ha, ha, ha.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
That’s a very odd place for a human being to be at—one of those do-or-die situations. It was one of those moments I’ve had in my life where I thought I’d rather—you could talk about it all the fuck you want, but I was confronted with a real life-and-death situation, and I wanted to live.

So I hit him on the head with the weight. Not a big thing, but enough to get him off me. Then there was a knock at the door—and it was the cops.

For once, I was really happy to see them.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I thought, “I can do this—I can dance.” But then I talked to my husband, and he didn’t want me to be a stripper.

I said, “What? After you tell me how great a place this is? Was that just something you said to make me okay with the fact that you’re working here?”

Patrick was like, “No, no, no!”

I said, “Well, then, I want to do this. You know, it’s not like I have a lot of extra money. We’re both college students; you know this would be good for the both of us.”

He gave in. But he never worked there when I was working. He always
hated it, and eventually he ended up quitting ‘cause I got really good at stripping. I was never a hustler, so I didn’t make tons of money. I enjoyed dancing, though, and the guys appreciated that I was nice to them.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
The cops took him away. I did the testimony on tape. Turns out the guy had murdered two other girls in different places in Southern California. He was a real serious nut. Just a bad, bad guy. A woman-hater. Hated me. Told the cops that he was trying to kill me, but I was too hard to kill.

But the cops were mad at me because I still had my stage clothes on because I was going to meet this guy I really liked. I knew what it looked like—it looked like a trick gone bad.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I started thinking about doing porn when I saw all the feature girls come through the club—the porn stars that dance at clubs, for a week at a time, and make all this money.

Some of them weren’t outrageously famous, but they were good dancers—people like Victoria Paris, Angela Barron, Tracy Lane. The main one that I just adored was Jeanna Fine, but the clincher was when Samantha Strong came out, and I hung out with her for the whole week. She was like, “Don’t ever get your boobs done; I wish I hadn’t gotten mine done.” She was awesome.

Samantha, Jeanna Fine, and Victoria Paris had all given me their agents’ addresses. So I started talking to my husband about doing porn, and, of course he wasn’t thrilled by that either. Eventually I told him “You know, this is something I’m gonna do; if you don’t like it I’m sorry.”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
After some of the cops took away the crazy guy, this emergency service guy comes in, and he’s a fucking novice. He’s measuring my eyes with a flashlight.

I’m like, “Get that fucking thing away from me!”

He’s like, “Officer, she’s in shock.”

So the cop comes over and says, “She’s not in shock; she’s a heroin addict.”

I go, “Listen…” I could hardly talk. I said, “Listen man, don’t you think I’ve had a hard enough time for one night?”

I don’t know what it was, but he said, “Yeah, I do. I’m going to leave now, lady.”

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
Patrick and I were having problems; I was just not happy. So I told him, “You know, I’m gonna try out this porn thing. I might hate it. But I’m really gonna hate you if you tell me I can’t do this. If that’s the way you feel, we need to separate.”

He didn’t want to do that, so he decided to let me try it. I took some
pictures and sent them to
Hustler,
for the Beaver Hunt thing, and they got accepted. At the same time, I made it to the national finals for the
Deja Vu
Stripper of the Year contest, and I won fifth in the nation. I was in medical school at the time, and I had to decide whether to allow my pictures to be published in the Stripper of the Year Contest. I had been doing everything very discreetly until then because I didn’t want the medical school to find out.

But I let them publish the pictures, and I sent some to Jim South. Joey Silvera was at Jim South’s office the day my pictures arrived, and he called me from there and asked me when I could come out to shoot.

I was like, “Oh my God!”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
After the guy attacked me, I was in full-on, posttraumatic shock. I kept seeing him coming over the balcony, seeing him in the rearview mirror. It was horrible. I went nuts. All I could do was shoot dope and shoot coke—and never enough of it. I just sat there propped up against a couch in my house, with a gun and a bunch of dope.

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
I knew I liked being a bit of an exhibitionist with dancing. I didn’t know if I would feel the same way about sex, but I was willing to give it a shot.

When I came out to L.A. and met Joey Silvera, I was attracted to him a little bit when I first saw him. He was a little older than what I was used to; I was twenty, and I think Joey was forty-three—twenty-three years older than me. But he was definitely an attractive person. He was just a sweetheart.

I still remember his dick was very pretty, ha, ha, ha. It was very nice looking, a nice shape—not too big, not too small—and mushroom-shaped. I mean, just exactly what I felt a dick should look like. Up until that point, I had only been with my husband, and I had only seen maybe three or four dozen porn movies, so those porn movies made up the other dicks I’d seen in my life, ha, ha, ha.

My first scene ended up being with Joey, on
Fashion Sluts 7.
Joey was the director, and he was the person I was with. It was very relaxed, and since he was the person I was with, that made me feel better. Then, when we were making love, Joey was like, “Do you do anal?” I didn’t understand that there’s this negotiating process in the porn business, where you hold out for a while to get more money, ha, ha, ha. I just knew I’d done it in my private life, so I said, “Oh, I’ll do anal.”

He said, “Okay, great. We’re going to do an anal now, okay?”

I’m like, “Okay, sure.”

I was nervous because a couple times in my private life it wasn’t so easy
to do anal, if I wasn’t feeling relaxed. But Joey told me we could stop at any time; he really put me at ease. And it turned out great. If I hadn’t been nervous I think I would have really enjoyed the sex.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
I had built up my production company again, but I was shooting dope, and I was very unhappy. I thought, “Aagh, this pesky work! Fuck! It gets in the way every time. I’ll just deal dope!”

TRICIA DEVERAUX
:
After Joey, I started working with these two guys, Christopher Alexander and Bucky Malibu, who were the two shooting the
Nasty
series with Mr. Marcus. I got along really well with them, and after I went back to the Midwest to medical school they called me up.

They said, “We have this big production set up. One of the girls flaked, and we don’t want to cancel the whole shoot, and we thought you’d be a good girl to be in it.”

I’m like, “Oh, that’s flattering.”

He started describing it to me. “It would be fourteen guys and one girl….”

Ha, ha, ha.

I said, “Well, I just need a little bit of time to think about it.” The most I’d been with at that time was three guys for John Leslie, which included my first DP—double penetration.

So he said, “Well, if you could actually think about it really quick ’cause if you decide not to do it, we still have to find another girl.”

I talked to my husband, and of course he doesn’t want me to do it, but by that point he had already spent ten thousand dollars of my money on his stupid car. So I was like, “You know what? I don’t care what he thinks. I’m gonna go do this.”

SHARON MITCHELL
:
So I started dealing, and my old boyfriend calls me up: “Oh, I’m just out of jail, and I hear you’re living in the neighborhood.”

“No, you can’t come over. No, no.”

He whines a bit, right? So I let him come over.

I go, “Listen, this is really good stuff. You have to do just a little bit of it….”

So he goes in the bathroom, locks the door, and the last thing I hear him say is, “God, that’s good!”

Then I hear this
bang, crash, boom.
Obviously he’d OD’d; his head hit the sliding glass door on the shower. I’m pounding on the bathroom door. I open it up, he’s blue—he’s, like,
gray
—and I’m like, “Oh, man, this motherfucker!”