Girlvert: A Porno Memoir Page 3

  I don’t know anyone, even now, who gets regular PCR DNA HIV testing done except for porn actors. People who do pornography get them done every thirty days, mandatory. We would have to get used to it. Tyler had a huge fear of needles back then. I only wish he could have held on to some of that fear in the future.

  After all of the heavy stuff at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation clinic in Sherman Oaks, just around the corner from World Modeling, we had to go home and celebrate. Ernesto, our neighbor three doors away, was a cocaine dealer. He’d become our close friend and confidante. He was the first person to whom we confessed our new adventure. He didn’t judge or lecture us. Ernesto’s job was way more exploitive and immoral than porn, anyway. The whole thing brought us much closer.

  Tyler was the one who really got me into cocaine. I’d tried it once before when I was eighteen. I was standing outside of Club Blue on Las Palmas and jumped into some stranger’s limo. I didn’t think it was all that great because I was already on speed when some old dude told me to close my eyes and take a sniff of blow. I’d been going through some months when I would do speed for a couple of days straight with different people. Thankfully, meth was never a long-term problem for me. Pot is something I’ve detested since my junior year in high school. It bores me. Stimulation, not sedation, was what I was after. I got into those liquor store diet pills called Mini Thins for a semester in junior college. Since they were basically pure ephedra, I developed an eye twitch and chronic dry mouth. Not the sexiest drug to take, but I liked to take drugs. Except heroin and painkillers. And pot.

  Tyler kept reassuring me that I would like cocaine. “Just keep trying it. Sometimes it takes people like five times before they really feel it. You’ll love it. Trust me.” He was so right. After we did it together four or five times, I loved it. Cocaine was the best discovery since flavored lip-gloss. It revolutionized my world. It felt amazing. Better than speed, which made me feel dirty and a little isolated. Coke brought the world together. It was a happy drug. I didn’t understand why there was so much propaganda against it. It didn’t seem harmful at all. The coke users we met were young and beautiful, not at all like dirty-ass tweakers. Why didn’t I know about this stuff in high school or elementary school?

  Doing coke brought Tyler and me much closer. So did doing ecstasy. We didn’t consider ourselves drunks or druggies, just partiers. We were only after a good time, not a fix. I will honestly say that we were not drug addicts then. In the beginning, it was all very innocent. We had no idea when or how the problem was going to start.

  Tyler got some sleep the night before our first scene. I stayed up doing coke the entire time. Our HIV tests results came back negative, thank god. We were scheduled to be at Ed’s house in Northridge in the mid-afternoon. I drove us there. I had no trouble with the idea of driving high. I had just started doing coke on a regular basis a couple months earlier. I hadn’t yet become a paranoid wreck. The world was still just opening up like a bouquet for stargazers. Before we left for the big event, Ernesto extended a line of credit for a couple more grams to take with us. Ernesto was always looking out for us in this way.

  Ed’s house was a big, two-story building with a long, winding driveway. It looked like a nice, normal valley home. Any unsuspecting passerby wouldn’t assume that this was the location for about two thousand porno scenes. Nobody knew, as we turned up the driveway that sunny March afternoon, that we were going to shoot for More Dirty Debutantes Volume 227.

  Ed smiled warmly as he answered the door and led us into his home. He was a fifty year old bachelor pornographer. He looked just like he did on the video boxes, about five-foot-five, bald on top, long, graying stringy hair in the back. His thick eyebrows accentuated his welcoming gestures. He wore round glasses and had a mustache and goatee. He was dressed in a black tee shirt and sweats. He had a belly on him. He used expressions such as “make love” and “climax.” He called himself old-fashioned. The house was large and clean. The clutter around was nothing unusual, just what you would expect from a middle-aged, childless man. Papers on the desks, dressers, and tables. Bad art and ’80s furniture. There weren’t any posters of tits like there were inside World Modeling.

  The massive amount of coke I had been doing for the past two days made me jumpy. I was incredibly high. I’m not sure if I would have made it if I hadn’t been on drugs. Coke helped me ignore the risks I was taking. I proceeded without caution. My life was in the moment. Nothing wrong with that, right? Buddhists live their lives that way, like the om? I told myself giant heaps of nonsense to rationalize the hazards that I put myself in daily. Ed showed me where to get ready, in his large bathroom upstairs, next to the master bedroom. Perfect, because I had to do some more coke before we started. I stayed in there with the door shut for quite a while, doing line after line and brushing my hair a lot. Tyler joined me for a couple lines and warned me not to do it all. I had a way with coke, usually finishing it all in the first thirty minutes.

  My boyfriend led me to where the action was to take place. Ed snapped some photos of us standing side by side with our shirts off, and then he shot some just of me. We might as well have stepped off a Greyhound bus from Arkansas. There was a tripod with a video camera set up, pointed directly at a four-poster bed. It was all completely generic, cheap sheets on the bed. Ed was the king of this amateur formula, and he definitely nailed the décor. I can’t remember what I said in response to the light interview Ed wanted for the intro to the sex. I am sure my nose was red and running the whole time. I was so fucked up and nervous. I just wanted to look good. A lot of the naked bodies on the boxes of porn movies were unflattering. With that camera pointed at me, alone, I was hot and sweaty, the bright lights frozen on my twitchy face. Now I was supposed to tell the camera—and everyone who would watch the video—what my name was, and where I was from. “Ashley, from Southern California,” I said.

  When the sex began, I was able to relax. Crazy sex was what I went there to do, and felt more familiar than talking to the camera. My racing mind shut off, and my body came alive. It was hardcore, since that was what Tyler and I liked. He shoved the back of my head as I deep-throated his cock, and then Ed’s. Ed’s cock was extremely small. He was very polite with it, too. He didn’t like any rough stuff. He even wore a condom. Both sex partners stayed completely hard during it all. I was impressed because of Ed’s age and the amount of cocaine Tyler had done before we started. Coke is usually kryptonite to an erection.

  It was the ultimate kink experience. I didn’t think I would like porno as much as when we fucked other people at home. The presence of the camera was intimidating and sexy in the same way that a person who was way out of my league was. How did I look in front of it? Was I hot enough for it? Even though I still wasn’t entirely confident about myself, I wanted to be the most beautiful thing that ever fucked. It meant something greater than what we were actually doing. Yeah, the three of us were fucking, but there was going to be an audience for it. In my head, I was everywhere, the future, the present; I was getting fucked while smiling and trying to enjoy myself. This first scene was telling me that I liked doing porn.

  Ed’s body wasn’t one I would normally fuck, with that big, white belly. My focus wasn’t on him so much as it was the idea of him. I was high and completely into the idea of letting this older guy fuck my ass and pay me for it. It was for a movie. It wasn’t real life. My relationship was with that camera, and I wanted to turn it on and shock it. I wanted to shove it in the faces of everyone who would be watching someday: I was wild, a crazy girl, and I didn’t care. I was an exhibitionist.

  Tyler loved to see me get fucked by other guys, so long as he was a part of it. Not only did it bring us together in a new and unusual way, there was just as much importance put on bonding with the other men. Tyler wanted to create and strengthen friendships with the other guys fucking me, in a brotherly or fraternal way. He liked to put the “team” in “tag team.” The size of Ed’s penis definitely gave Tyler a boo
st of confidence. Maybe that’s why Ed’s movies were so popular, I thought. Every guy watching could feel good about the size of his own cock by watching Ed’s.

  We did a few clumsy and easy-going positions. Our DP was just like any regular one we did at home. All of it was purely amateur. Tyler came, a creampie in my puss. Ed came in his condom and then squeezed out the contents onto my chest. I guess it’s what he had to do to prove to the viewers that he still had it in him. When everyone’s fluids had been properly secreted and exchanged, we were done. The tripod didn’t have to budge. Everything was captured on tape. From beginning to end, Tyler and I were out of there in about four hours. We left happy and fifteen hundred dollars richer. The ass-fucking sobered me up, as it always does. We cheerfully said goodbye to nice old Ed, thanking one another for such a good experience.

  Backing down the long driveway, I noticed that it was still the same lovely spring day. I wasn’t nervous anymore. I was giddy and elated. I felt light and excited in my stomach and on the bottoms of my feet. There was a strong momentum going straight up and forward in my body. I could have pushed the car back to Hollywood with all the excitement that I felt.

  “Tyler, do you feel bad?”

  “No! No way, I feel great! That was so cool and so easy.”

  “Yeah, neither do I. I mean. I feel…good. I thought it would suck and be scary, but it was the opposite!”

  “Can you believe we just did that?” He laughed as he steered the wheel.

  “No!” I was smiling and laughing. We were so happy. It was such an authentic and unexpected feeling. I thought we would be devastated, hanging our heads, regretting it all straightaway. Phrases such as “What have we done?!” were supposed to come out of our mouths, not “cool and easy!”

  “It’s not like we’ll do it forever, just for now,” Tyler rationalized.

  “Yeah, I want to keep doing it, but not long-term,” I agreed.

  “We’ll just make a bunch of money, and we’ll get out of it.”

  “I can save up money for school. Back to college in the fall!”

  “We can do this and open up a restaurant! I’ll start cooking again!” Tyler had lived in Barcelona for three years, where he studied gastronomy and culinary arts at a prestigious school before moving to Los Angeles. Originally from Houston, Texas, he spoke the most beautifully fluent Spanish I’d ever heard coming out of a white person.

  It all seemed so simple and inspirational. Porno was how we would subsidize our dreams. We felt lucky. By the time our movies came out, we would be long gone from this business. I would be back in school, studying for my fine arts degree. Tyler would be opening up his own restaurant. He would call it Chez Naomi, after his grandmother. We had so much hope. Porno was the land of opportunity.

  We continued to chuckle and discuss the highlights all the way home. Our friends would never believe it. I thought that I would feel more like a prostitute when it was all over. We were paid for sex, technically. But that wasn’t how it felt at all. What we did was completely legal, no matter how taboo. We didn’t get paid for fucking Ed. We were paid to make a movie, a product. Videotape was the focal point. It wasn’t all about getting this old guy off. Our job was to make a sex tape. There is a difference.

  Tyler drove and I sat in the passenger seat doing key bumps of coke out of the leftover gram. It was still our little secret, porn. Our own little moment to share. We had just put one over big-time on everyone. We felt like we’d broken the rules, and it was magnificent. It was all just some big, unreal, and crazy joke.

  Chapter Four

  Breaking Me In

  WE started to get more work, sometimes alone, usually together, and we didn’t get all of our porno references from World Modeling. Coincidentally, our casual DP partner, Colby, did some music for a porn company called Anabolic. Anabolic produces “gonzo” porn—very hardcore movies that have no story, no script, and a handheld camera pointed at the girl getting fucked. There are no frills. It’s all bare mattresses and butt-fucking. The attitude is Go For It, with no distraction from the penetration. Gonzo is notorious for guys getting rough with the girls. The object of an Anabolic porno is for the girl to be degraded and fucked very, very hard. Not for anyone sensitive to the word “whore.”

  Tyler was a big fan of the Anabolic movies. Anabolic produced films with three or more guys on one girl, with lots of anal and ass-to-mouth, or ATMs. Tyler bought a couple of Anabolic movies with a porn star named Belladonna in them so I could see what “cool porn” was. The name calling, slapping, and choking made a lasting impression on me. It did not intimidate me because it was similar to games that I already played during sex, but it made me want to take it all to a higher—a professional—level. Tyler called me slut and whore and got rough and slapped me when we fucked. I would hold my chin steady and try not to tear up. I knew he couldn’t really mean it. Sex allows people to lose their rationality. Tyler got to be a tough guy when we had sex. I loved him and wanted him to enjoy that.

  Colby was so excited for us. He wanted to help us out in any way he could. Having a close friend not judge us or think less of what we were doing was a huge relief. Colby was upbeat about the whole thing. He congratulated us in his thick Norwegian accent. It was as if we’d just announced our wedding engagement.

  “I know you two will do really good in it! I’ll introduce you to all the people I know at Anabolic. I’m friends with all those guys. I’m going to call my really good friend right now. Have you guys heard of Victor Viewer? I just saw him today. We’re going to have lunch together tomorrow.”

  The next afternoon, a Tuesday, Tyler and I drove to Woodland Hills. Among a group of newly constructed, peach colored condos, we found Victor’s. Tyler’s eyes lit up when he saw Victor Viewer open the door. You’d have thought he had a gay crush, but Wow, I want to be just like you, was the sentiment. The best. Pure envy. Dozens of times, Tyler had watched this guy fuck in videos, and now we were at his house. Tyler was ecstatic to meet him. He assured Victor that we were crazy for sex and told him all about our orgies with Colby, but it all dripped off Victor without impression. With blasé resignation, he agreed to take some photos of us.

  I started to feel uneasy. I was coked out of my mind, but that was normal. I instantly got the vibe that Victor was not a kind person. I didn’t know my instincts well enough back then to trust or act upon them. I was so young and on drugs, I just went along. Everyone deserves a chance, right? I told myself. Don’t be so judgmental! So instead of his demeanor, I just tried to focus on Victor’s body, which was interesting enough to look at—a miniature body builder, big biceps and pectorals, dark silky hair.

  Victor told us to take a seat on the couch. I didn’t notice how short he really was until Tyler stood up to undress for the naked Polaroids. At six foot one, Tyler towered over this man, who could have only been five foot four. Victor was handsome in the face, despite his cold eyes. He talked to us condescendingly about the business. I wasn’t listening to what he said. I just kept smiling and using my big, straight, white set of teeth as armor for my trepidation. I’ve never had braces. Somehow, I have been blessed with a terrific set of teeth. It is a rarity to find healthy, pretty, and authentic teeth in pornography. Mine were often my shield. There was just something that radiated from Victor that made me ill at ease. I can’t point out one specific thing he said or did to give me the fear, just an overall eeriness, an aura of badness. Tyler and I got naked for our Polaroids, which was the ritual of every porn director thus far. For me, a frontal, back, and bent-over shot.

  Tyler had to be hard for his photo. To his (and my) horror, he couldn’t get it up. He jiggled, wiggled, and jacked, but his dick just hung limp, lifeless. I think Victor’s bad energy got to Tyler’s dick and poisoned it. We went into the bathroom for a couple of minutes. Tyler kissed me, felt up my boobs and ass, trying to make the connection. I sucked it for a minute. Nothing was bringing blood into that shaft. It might have been all the coke we did right before our arrival. I do
n’t know. His dick just refused to work.

  “Well, look, if you can’t even take this picture, I can’t use you in any of my scenes. Sorry, man.” Victor shrugged it off, smirking at Tyler’s failure. Then he added, “I need my guys to be solid. One hundred percent. No exceptions.”

  Victor could definitely use me in a movie though. How about Thursday? Sure, a DP, and I do interracial, right? Of course! I wanted to prove to the world that I wasn’t a racist. I’d never even kissed a black guy before porno, but I loved to fuck them on film. Amorously, I have always been into tall, pale, blue-eyed artists. I was afraid I’d end up becoming a racist if I never fucked a black man. I wasn’t a bigot, but I also didn’t fully understand how people became bigots. Members of my own family are shameless racists, and I was willing to do anything to dissociate myself from them. I thought about doing black guys the first day I walked into World Modeling. I wanted the opportunity to deconstruct myself and society with no emotional strings attached. Porno gave me that.

  When we left Victor’s place, we felt awful. Tyler was humiliated, and I felt guilty for succeeding alone in what we came to do together. Tyler started yelling at me.

  “Why didn’t you help me out? You could have paid more attention to me! Act like you love me once in a while? I thought we were only going to work together, with each other. Why didn’t you insist that I be in the scene? You didn’t stick up for me at all! Don’t you fucking love me? Do you?” Tyler’s hands were punching the passenger seat. He lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke against the windshield as he became more and more upset. One thing that I cannot stand—that always escalated arguments behind the wheel—was smoking in the car.