Through these films, I grew more and more curious about the “pro” scene. When you got lucky, things got interesting out here in the Santa Cruz sticks, but everybody knew that down south was where it was really happening. Los Angeles was where the stars were—the pom stars. That’s where you did this job professionally. Not as a weekend thing, not between shifts at the Reddi Mart or a juice bar, and not as an experiment. LA was where the lifers were.
I envisioned them as an elite pack of misfits with nice asses who had made the commitment to go ultrapublic with their cum grunts. Few were well known by the masses—really only Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson could boast of true name recognition—but every girl who’d made it onto the box cover of one of Anabolic’s Initiations was a luminary in her own right. Every greasehead director who’d released six titles of his own Cherry Poppers rip-off was getting play in thousands of darkened rooms every evening. And every newbie starlet was somebody’s favorite, had at least one guy totally excited, daydreaming at work, thinking, what if I really met her?
It was a minor and manageable kind of fame. These were smalltime, makeshift celebrities, and they honestly fascinated me. I wanted baseball cards of all of them, so I could memorize their stats. Led the league in DPs in 1995 ... Signed with Vivid right out of high school. . . Traveled for half the ’92 season . . . Set Los Angeles Metro area record for most on-set Vicodins swallowed in a single afternoon, 14 .. . Spent much of the 1998 season at Oak Tree Rehabilitation Center for Drug and Alcohol Dependence . . . Returned in 1999 with surgically enhanced breasts and husband-manager, director Leon Gucci . . . Still holds single-season record for most anal gangbangs, 8...
And what about the guys? Some of them put up crazy numbers. Janay said that she had done a photo shoot with a guy who had been in over two thousand movies. That was Lou Gehrig-like. And some of the workhorses who had been going for twenty years, like Peter North and Tom Byron—well, they had probably done like five thousand films. Maybe more. I’d had sex with ten women in my life. It boggled my mind a little. These people were special.
My porn proficiency leaped when I found an Internet site called LukeFord.com, a gold mine of porn star gossip and history, run by the son of famous Seventh-day Adventist preacher Desmond Ford. Luke, genuinely fascinated by the performers and their chaotic personal lives, had spent several years of his life establishing himself as the industry’s most dedicated journalist. The extensive, fairly literate star profiles that he published on his site were generally fair-minded and impartial (he would often transcribe entire interviews verbatim), but in an industry where tempers flared easily, he ^oon acquired a reputation as a muckraker and gossip hound. Especially vexing to some was his habit of printing the real names and birthplaces of performers.
Luke was a bit of a character in his own right. In the summer of 2000, when I started to read him, he had already converted to Orthodox Judaism, and his rabbi was threatening to excommunicate him if he didn’t sever his well-known association with the adult industry. Eventually, after several months of public vacillation, the guy ended up selling his site, quitting the business, and then, in true porno fashion, staging a comeback. It was excellent drama. And though some found his writing fantastical, I felt like I had gained a great deal from Luke.
Take, for instance, Tony Eveready, one of my new favorite gangbang guys. How could I have thought, without Luke, that he had been romantically involved for two years with the actress known as Porsha? Never mind that I wasn’t exactly sure who Porsha was; I could hunt around, do some detective work, find out. And Chasey Lain: the Wicked Pictures contract star had two implants in each tit. That was interesting to me.
And there was more, too. Plenty more according to Luke:
Tori Welles, star of The Chameleon, had been a teenage runaway prostitute. Felecia, the hottest Latina in the business, had a crush on Jodie Foster—she wanted to kiss her “beautiful little hips.”
T.T. Boy’s favorite movie was Gone With the Wind. Larry Flynt lost his virginity to a chicken. Dave Hardman got paid a dollar a pound to have sex with obese starlets in films like Heavyweight Cumtenders. Dynamite devirginized High Pitch Erik on the Howard Stern show for five grand. On Steve Hatcher’s first shoot, Nina Hartley sauntered over to him, stroked him twice, and said, “That’s a fine, fuckable dick you’ve got there. You’ll go far in this business.”
Keri Windsor grew up in Saudi Arabia. Vince Voyeur hated to get his balls wet. Kelly Nichols appeared in the movie C.H.U.D.— Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. Black porn queen Midori was singer Jody Watley’s little sister. Rocco Siffredi used to go by “Tito.”
Soon I’d generated a list of favorite stars, and I’d look for them in video stores—Misti Rain, Krysti Myst, Belladonna, Mirage. I checked out the American Cocksucking Championship series for Adriana Sage, and came away a huge Alexandra Quinn fan. She had a good entry on Luke Ford: she’d pulled “a Traci Lords” and performed while underage for two years, then, after being deported to her native Canada, returned to LA and hit the scene with renewed determination and heightened freakishness. I talked about her with Periwinkle, who seemed for some reason to think that at one point she’d been a man. A huge homeless guy who strolled around downtown Santa Cruz with a radio wrapped in a garbage bag agreed. Online, one fan wrote, “Quinn likes to get fucked with a loaded gun held to her head.” I believed it.
I began to contemplate mingling among this exotic band of outcasts. What would they think of me? Would they accept me as one of their own, welcome me into the fold? Perhaps they’d see right through my charade instantly, recognizing me as weak and privileged. I spent whole nights mapping out intricate, imaginary conversations in laborious detail.
With July dying, I brought a copy of my first video to a film forum in San Francisco and screened it for a small audience. Sandy Spago, the curator, an attractive twenty-four-year-old blonde with a wry smile and a big ass, said she’d found it“intriguing.” I heard something in her voice that told me to push further.
“Like porn, do ya?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ever thought about giving it a whirl?”
She grinned at me teasingly. “Maybe I already have.”
Immediately, I whisked her away to North Beach to drink wine and talk smut.
“It was a spanking video,” she related. “Candy Asses, or something like that. I wanted to do something wild, you know?”
“Sure.”
“But he made me cry, the bastard. Just kept going and going until I broke, even though I said my safe word. I said my safe word.” She glared at me over the top of her wineglass. “Those fuckers just wanted to see a real reaction.”
“Looks better on camera,” I explained.
“Yeah, great.” She scowled darkly. “I never even got a copy of the film.”
“Maybe you could buy one,” I suggested.
Sandy stared at me balefully for a moment and then just shook her head. “I want to do it again. Do it right this time.”
“Why?”
“I like the attention,” she said seriously.
I grinned. “Well, I’m not real interested in making a spanking video.”