It was Almost Famous. In fact, there was one morning that I got up from my bunk around 6 A.M. and went down to sit in the front lounge with the bus driver. Vinnie came down, then Grady the guitar tech—they probably hadn’t even been to bed yet. I was watching the world go by out the window when they started singing “Tiny Dancer” to me, just like the band does on the bus in Almost Famous. A couple of others joined; these were metal guys serenading me with “Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man.” In the movie, teenage Patrick Fugit’s character says to Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane near the end of the song, “I have to go home.” She holds up a hand to his face, like she’s casting a spell. “You are home,” she says.
We were this new circus family. Every night girls came on the bus. Some of the guys used to collect Polaroids of the girls, and it was my job to take the pictures. I took good shots, I have to say, because I genuinely wanted the girls to look their best for rock chick posterity. Some of them were crazy, though. One night a girl tried to steal the towel rack from the bus bathroom. We had to tackle her. Another time these girls came on—one beautiful and one as ugly as her attitude. They kicked off the ugly one, but the pretty one wanted to stay. In fact, she wanted to leave with us. As soon as the bus started in the giant empty arena parking lot, one tiny set of headlights turned on in the distance. Then the car came at us like something out of Christine. Our driver floored it, but she kept coming and almost rammed the bus. She was screaming out the window, “Give me back my friend!” And the pretty one didn’t want to go! Sorry. Maybe if you’d just been nicer.
When we got to Cleveland, Billy Corgan and the country singer David Allan Coe came to the show. Billy was standing next to me up front, singing along to every Pantera song but doing it in his Smashing Pumpkins voice. It was so surreal. There were a lot of pyrotechnics and concussive blasts in the show, and I had memorized the time from seeing the concert over and over. When I knew a loud noise was about to hit, I would elbow Billy and signal him to put his fingers in his ears. He was so cute about it. We all went to the Crazy Horse strip club after, and Billy came along. When the night was over, the back of Billy’s Range Rover was blocked by a pole, and we had to move it so all the extra people we’d been collecting could get in the back. I was the only one sober enough to drive, so I got behind the wheel super cocky, but I accidentally put it in reverse and backed it right into a pole. He wasn’t mad at all, and there was no physical damage—just to my ego.
I had decided Chicago would be where I left the circus. I needed to get back to work. We had a night off, so we got rooms at the Ritz. They’d wanted to stay at the Four Seasons, but the last time they were there Dimebag Darrell from Pantera threw a chair out the window and the band was banned. We got in at midmorning, and we went straight to bed. I was staying with Wookie and for some reason I fucked him. It was just a friend thing, but we passed out right after and slept all day.
We had a band dinner at this really nice steak house in the city, and the restaurant had a dress code that required jackets on the men. Fortunately, the restaurant loaned the guys some to wear. The rocker tour uniform was T-shirts, camo shorts, and combat boots—so imagine that topped with stuffy suit coats. We all strolled in like we were crashing the debutante ball, and they ended up getting so drunk. Kerry King from Slayer sat to my right, tattoos all over his bald head. Let the record show that throughout this whole ruckus, Kerry had impeccable table manners. He was the only one who knew which fork went with which dish.
There was a guy playing the harp, and at one point, Rex from Pantera went over and dropped a few hundreds in his bowl. He took the harp away and started playing it like a bass. I was just amazed they didn’t kick us out. Maybe Kerry’s good manners saved us.
After one last concert, it was time for me to go back to my own tour. My friend Exotica and her roadie husband, Vinnie, were throwing a Fourth of July party at their house in a residential area outside Chicago. Exotica was a gorgeous Latin feature dancer, and she said I could stay with her until Mac arrived with my Durango and trailer. “My friends will drop me off in the morning before the party,” I told her. “I can help set up.”
We partied all night in Chicago, and at 6 A.M., our huge tour bus rolled into Exotica’s white-picket-fence neighborhood. We parked, and the bus heaved a sigh of air brakes that I am sure woke the whole neighborhood, because suddenly people were all at their front doors. Exotica and her husband came out, too, staring with their mouths open.
Pantera and all my friends got off the bus to help me get my stuff out of the bay. Each gave me one last hug.
I walked up to Exotica. “Who are your friends?” she asked me, dumbfounded.
“They’re the best,” I said. “The best.”
Mac and I started a romance on the road, and as we became more of a couple, he would get jealous. We fought a lot, and sometimes it got physical. There was a night I climbed through the window of a bathroom I’d locked myself in to get away from him. I wasn’t having that, so I fired him and broke up with him all at once. We’re cool now, but back then we just weren’t good together.
I found Jay, a smaller guy who wasn’t there for security but was great as a roadie. He could drive twenty-four hours without stopping and could size up a club within a minute of walking in. He was a bass player, and I have a thing for bass players, so I fell for him, too.
I’d clocked two years of feature dancing and was killing myself driving all over. I was making a hundred dollars a show before tips and doing fifteen shows a week. The problem was that I had topped out on rate. I’d done just about every magazine except Penthouse and Playboy. And the only way to bump your rate up after you top out is to do films. Devon Michaels, who opened so many doors for me, was in the same boat. She called me one day and told me, “I’m going to go to L.A. I’ve decided to do porn.”
“Oh, my God, wow,” I said. I didn’t have any negative views of people who worked in the adult entertainment industry. In fact, I loved porn and had a collection of DVDs. This was before the internet made porn so readily accessible—you had to want it to see it.
“You should come with me,” she said.
“I’ve never…”
“I’ll buy your ticket,” she said. “Will you come with me?”
Sold. We both flew to L.A. on May 1, 2002. Right off the plane that very first day, she was booked to do an all-girl sex scene for Makin’ It, a film for Wicked Pictures. It starred Stephanie Swift playing a young singer trying to break into show business. Wicked was actually my favorite of the various movie studios. They made very cinematic films that blended action and story, many of which were remakes of popular mainstream films or send-ups of genres. My favorite film was Dream Quest, a 2000 Wicked production starring Jenna Jameson as a modern woman drawn into a fairy tale. It was directed by Brad Armstrong, who would be shooting Devon that day. Brad was also a performer, and I found him incredibly hot.
Devon asked if I wanted to come along, and of course I did. That day I learned what I still tell people: “You don’t want to go to set. It’s going to ruin porn for you forever.” It’s not that it’s somehow degrading or gross—it’s that there’s nothing spontaneous about it whatsoever. Everyone is there to do a job. I saw this way up close right away, because Brad said I could sit in a little closet on set, just three feet from the four-way but still out of the shot. It was the film’s star Stephanie Swift, Nicole Sheridan, my friend Devon, and another girl pretending to be in the dressing room of a Coyote Ugly–type bar. They’re dancers and they’re counting their tips, which naturally leads to getting out dildos.