Underneath It All (8 page)

Again following the noise, I found my director behind a camera watching a woman having sex with two guys. Blushing, I gawked at them. I had never seen anyone have sex before, and it was so aggressive, so primal the way this woman moaned that it scared the crap out of me.
Oh my God, is that what they expect me to do!?
I turned and ran down the hall to the front door. I knew exactly what kind of movie this was now—and I wasn't having it.
I tore out of the parking lot and was gone before anyone knew I'd arrived. I called North from a pay phone a few blocks away screaming at him for lying to me. He told me to "grow up," pissed that I had left and saying I'd make him look bad. If I wanted to ever work again I'd better get my butt back there and apologize for being late. I hung up on him and sat in my car downing vodka and of at eight-something in the morning. I knew I had to go back.
Where else would I go? What else could I do?
I tried to imagine what having sex on-camera would be like, but I couldn't even fathom it. I decided I'd just go back, at least apologize for quitting, and hope that North would still keep me on as a model.
By the time I arrived back at the house, I had a good buzz on and was feeling braver. This time everyone was waiting for me. I was rushed off to makeup where the director greeted me. I started to ask questions, but he interrupted me, telling me not to worry. All I had to do was walk around the pool in my bikini during the party scene. I searched his face to see if he was tricking me, but he seemed serious.
I felt better instantly. I'd gotten worked up over nothing and damn near ruined everything!
Sitting quietly having my face painted, I was glad I'd come back. Several women and a few men were wandering around, and every once in a while someone would pop in and say hello to me. When it came time for my scene I did just what Richard had said. I strutted around the pool in my tiny bikini as the scene was filmed from a bunch of different angles.
The next day during the final take of the party scene, all the people around the pool spent the afternoon having sex. As the orgy started I was told I was finished for the day and could go home. Collecting my things, I made a pit stop at the kitchen to get a drink.
The image of all those breasts and asses, arms and legs wrapped around each other was fresh in my mind. It was a bizarre tangle of flesh, which I found erotic. The people had become a sea of groping, groaning bodies and I was amazed at the very matter-of-fact way the women acted. They stripped without any hesitance whatsoever and spread their legs without any hint of shame.
What did they know that I didn't and how did they find out?
As I poured myself a vodka, the stud of the moment, Tom Byron, walked in and started flirting with me. He asked if I lived around there and how long I'd been modeling, and though he seemed nice enough, I told him nothing td first. But he had this sweet, dopey puppy-dog thing going on and I let my guard down. I was wasted by that point, and since then I've often wondered if he'd been sent into the kitchen to seduce me or if he just got lucky. I'm still not sure why I let him have his way with me. I don't know what I was thinking. All I can say is I never intended to be filmed having sex in that kitchen, and I only realized I was being filmed when it was nearly over and I had already given in to a feeling I had never known during sex—power. And with that power came pleasure. I was blind to everything around me and I wasn't acting for a camera. I was acting out.
That's what porn did for me. It allowed me to release all the fury I'd felt my entire life. And that's what got me off. Freedom, peace, revenge, sex, power. I'd finally found a place to put my energies — I was vengeful, even savage, in sex scenes, fully unleashing my wrath. At the ripe old age of sweet sixteen, I was nothing short of a sexual terrorist.
Porn was a power trip for me. At the time I didn't understand it, but in reality I was fighting to take back what had been robbed from me as a child. There was a war going on in my heart and I was acting it out with my limbs. I was a sex-crazed, drugged-out wild child and I wreaked havoc on everyone I came across.
I had no one to talk to and nowhere to go. My drug habit consumed my every thought, and sex became a typical ending to most mornings, afternoons, and nights thanks to Sonny's insatiable appetite. I'd grown accustomed to first pleasing him and then going about my own business, so sex became like this price I eventually had to pay for any measure of love I was going to receive, and that was just the way things were.
I didn't know that sex and love could be one and the same thing, so sex became something that I both loved and hated. On the one hand, it made me feel scared and uncertain, since all my first experiences were violent ones, and on the other, it was power, so it gave me the only kind of control I ever knew. But resented that price tag. It made me angry, and that's what I showed the world.
But on the inside, I was a mess.
And I was vicious. Maybe, just maybe, if I gave my body away, then I would somehow win back the control that had !wen stripped from me all my life. So that's what I did, and porn became yet another drug in my junkie life.

Several weeks later I found myself on the set of another porn movie. Time had lost its meaning. The movies all blended together. I was like a passenger in my own life.
The bathroom was littered with used douches. The scent of stale cigarette smoke hung thickly in the air. I could hear the groans of porn queen Ginger Lynn, having sex in a back room, and wished I were somewhere else.
I was in between scenes. Barefoot and barely dressed, I searched the kitchen and found a bottle of tequila. Steadying myself as I did a shot, I snorted the last of the mashed-up downers I had. I stared at the photos on the refrigerator. The smiling faces of a young boy and little girl looked back and I wondered what it would be like to grow up rich in a mansion like this.
Was it easier? Were the kids in the pictures really happy? Or did they receive nighttime visits like I had? What kind of parents let people film porn in their house anyway? Stupid? Desperate? Both?
I didn't know.
Ginger's moans grew louder.
Didn't she ever shut up?
I was pissed off and disgusted by the thought of the upcoming lesbian scene I was supposed to have with this bitch on wheels. The thought of kissing her grossed me out,
but I guess it's better than having to fuck a fleshy hairball like Ron Jeremy
, I reasoned, still feeling less than lucky.
Moments later the downers took hold. I lit a Marlboro Red and found the enormous oval-shaped pool in the mansion's backyard. It was pitch-black outside except for the candles floating in the pool's shallow end. I dropped my robe and slid naked into the warm water feeling heavy, like I had ankle weights attached to me.
Everything was blurry, hazy, moving in slow motion. drifted toward the sound of laughing voices. As my body cut through the water, the voices grew louder and I reached for them, my hands pushing back water instead. I could see a gorgeous man standing waist-deep in front of me. He smiled, watching a goddess with long dark hair floating on her back, her small, perfect nipples pointing toward the heavens. I made my way toward her, and felt his hand glide across my back.
I wanted to be held, needed to disappear in her arms. But would she let me? She wasn't a porn star. She was better than that. None of these naked midnight swimmers did it on film. They were extras from some "real" modeling agency, not North's, and the producers were thrilled to have them there. We were filming the porn world's version of the movie
Splash
. I was supposed to be the mermaid, but in this version the mermaid liked to talk dirty. The producers of this film fancied themselves real Hollywood filmmakers because they had a budget that could actually afford extras.
My naked body met the flesh of the swimming creature, and I startled her by boldly running a finger across her belly. Our eyes met and I held my breath, waiting for her reaction. She smiled and splashed water at me. She was long, lean, and full of life. Laughing, she pulled me close and wrapped her arms around me. Her cool skin pressed against mine. I breathed her in, holding on to her, finding refuge in her arms. She kissed me softly and I kissed her back. It was different from all the other kisses I'd given and received that day on film. I bit into her lip, kissing her harder. I lost myself in the moment.
A wave or wooziness washed over me. . . .
Where was I?
I looked to the sky. The stars burned bright, telling me nothing. The woman bit me sharply on the nape of my neck and brought my attention back to her. I felt hands on my hips as someone slowly entered me from behind. I lost my breath, a sharp gasp escaping as he sank deeper into me. I was pretty sure it was the gorgeous man who had stroked my back, but the dark-haired woman's hungry mouth kept me from affirming it.
Moments later I was abruptly pulled from the water by a production assistant. He'd been searching for me for some time. Annoyed, he steered me inside toward the waiting film crew.
I was wanted on the set.
I was dried off, put back into makeup, and met with the smirking face of Ginger Lynn, the petite blond-haired blue-eyed twenty-something-year-old woman who had been the reigning diva of porn for the past year. She'd given me attitude from the moment I'd met her a few months earlier, clearly seeing me as competition. And she was right. Within months my tormented, aggressive sex acts and youthful good looks stole her flavor-ofthe-moment title, and she made sure I knew she didn't appreciate it one bit. I ignored the daggers she shot at me. We were scripted prostitutes performing for the camera. No emotions were ever attached. It was soulless sex by the numbers — one blow job, two positions, final cum shot, or some slight variation of that formula. Sex on-camera fed a very specific hunger in me. It was the best drug of all.
Porn made me the kind of girl people both condemned and paid attention to, and that's what it was all about.
I was hailed as the Princess of Porn. They gave me awards at the Porn Oscars. Performers like Ron Jeremy spoke about how professional I was. Dicks for hire like Tom Byron bragged about how we were offscreen lovers. And the story of my poolside threesome spread through the porn world like wildfire, making me even more sought after in porn films. I was thought of as insatiable. But it wasn't that I couldn't get enough on-screen. It was that I got nothing. I was venting, releasing the garbage that polluted my mind in the only way I knew how.
Over the next six months I starred in twenty X-rated films. That's about twenty days' work. Most of the films were shot in just one day. Only later did I find out that it was a common practice in the porn industry for these "sex scenes" to be repackaged, reedited, and made into a dozen other "new" films. The stars were never paid for the additional film compilations that exploited their services, but the companies made a fortune.
I was said to be one of the highest-paid girls in porn at the time, earning about a thousand dollars a day. It seemed like a lot of money then, but I was hardly rich, earning about twenty thousand in total, which was just enough to pay the rent and feed my coke habit—a fact I would find impossible to explain to the Internal Revenue Service years later.
Thanks to my status as the It girl of the moment, I was offered a guest stripping gig in San Francisco. My agent, Tim North, pressed me to take it. He didn't have to work hard, as I needed a break from Sonny.
The cracks in my Traci Lords persona were beginning to show.
One month later in the spring of 1985, two months before my seventeenth birthday, I took the stripping gig in San Francisco. I arrived feeling like a cracked doll. I stayed high as much as possible and found it difficult to do the most mundane things like take a shower. I was strung out, twitchy, and irritable.
I walked on-stage at the O'Farrell Theater stoned and drunk on cheap wine. But instead of feeling powerful and in control, I felt like a beaten little girl. I was a deer caught in the headlights, frozen in place as the horny crowd cheered for me to take it off. I couldn't breathe and found myself backing off the stage. I panicked, breaking into a full-out run in my precariously high heels. All I could see around me were groping hands.
In a heap in my dressing room, I sobbed uncontrollably, trying to explain to the club manager that I was not used to crowds of fans grabbing at me. He laughed as I cowered in the corner, begging to be sent home.
Instead, he sat me down in front of the makeup mirror and told me to fix my face. "You're not going anywhere until you finish up here," he said firmly.
"Look, baby" —he softened —"you're a pro, go make some money."
Twenty minutes and two shots later, I took the stage to Madonna's "Like a Virgin." A burning anger at being bullied into honoring my strip club contract replaced my stage fright, and I took my rage out on the patrons who'd scared me. It was a sellout crowd and I gave the bald businessmen what they wanted, wiggling in their laps and stripping naked as the tips came pouring in. I thrust my breasts in their faces, sold my panties to a guy in the audience, and then strutted from the stage, flipping the club manager the fuck-you finger as I slammed my dressing room door. I'd given them everything I had.
Then I fell apart.
A stripper named Raven who found me in my dressing room felt sorry for me and took me home to crash on her couch. When I woke up the next morning I was a basket case. I didn't know what I was going to do. I was strung out. Broke. Unemployed. And agentless, having fired North during a heated phone conversation about my unprofessional attitude the night before.
Gathering my things, I got into Raven's car, bound for the airport. I sighed deeply, dreading the wrath that awaited me in Los Angeles. I had called Sonny looking for a sympathetic ear but was given a tongue-lashing instead. He screamed at me over the phone, furious I had fired North, and demanded to know how I was going to support us now. I knew he was going to beat the crap out of me when I got home.
As we soared down the highway, I told Raven the whole story. It felt good to talk to someone who lived in the same world I did. She drove in silence, listening to my sad tale. When I'd finished she told me I needed to get a grip and that North wasn't the only agent in town. "That's just what he wants you to, think," she said.
She suggested I check out another agency in Hollywood that she worked with from time to time, saying it needed a girl for video that afternoon in Los Angeles. It was an R-rated bondage video, and she'd only turned it down because the San Francisco club manager wouldn't give her the night off to fly to L.A.
I knew nothing about tying people up, but she told me not to worry. The Japanese clients were really nice and she'd worked with them many times before. That gave me a glimmer of hope.
Maybe this could be my way out of porn?
Giving me the address, she told me she'd call the agent to confirm, and I'd meet him after the job.
I thanked her profusely, unaccustomed to receiving help from anyone.