She was so stoned on the set for Voodoo Vixens that she could barely go through the motions of the minimal plot. The director complained; her producer reminded her that retakes cost money, and privately noted that her looks were distinctly taking a shopworn plunge. When she threw up in her costar’s lap, he decided that Candi Thorne really wasn’t star material.
Rick explained that he was more disappointed than angry with her over getting canned, but this was after he d bloodied her lip. It wasn’t so much that this financial setback stood to wreck his career just as the breaks were falling in place for him, as it was that her drug habit had left them owing a couple thou to the man, and how were they going to pay that?
Candace still had a few contacts to fall back on, and she was back before the cameras before the bruises had disappeared. These weren’t the films that made the adult theater circuits. These were the fifteen-minute-or-so single-takes shot in motel rooms for the 9-mm. home projector/porno peepshow audiences. Her contacts were pleased to get a semi-name porno queen, however semi and however shopworn, even if the films seldom bothered to list credits or titles. It was easier to work with a pro than some drugged-out runaway or amateur hooker, who might ruin a take if the action got rough or she had a phobia about Dobermans.
It was quick work and quick bucks. But not enough bucks.
Rick was panic-stricken when two large black gentlemen stopped him outside a singles bar one night to discuss his credit and to share ideas as to the need to maintain intact kneecaps in this cruel world. They understood a young actor’s difficulties in meeting financial obligations, but felt certain Rick could make a substantial payment within forty-eight hours.
Candace hit the streets. It was that, or see Rick maimed. After the casting couch and exotic partners under floodlights, somehow it seemed so commonplace doing quickies in motel rooms and car seats. She missed the cameras. It all seemed so transient without any playback.
The money was there, and Rick kept his kneecaps. Between her work on the streets and grinding out a few 9-mm. films each month, Candace could about meet expenses. The problem was that she really needed the drugs to keep her going, and the more drugs she needed meant the more work to pay for them. Candace knew her looks were slipping, and she appreciated Rick’s concern for her health. But for Rick the Big Break was coming soon. She no longer minded when he had other women over while she was on the streets, or when he stayed away for a day or two without calling her.
She was selling her body for his career, and she must understand that sometimes it was necessary for Rick, too, to sleep around. In the beginning, some small compromises are to be expected.
A pimp beat her up one night. He didn’t like freelance chippies taking johns from his girls on his turf. He would have just scared her, had she agreed to become one of his string, but she needed all her earnings for Rick, and the truth was the pimp considered her just a bit too far gone to be worth his trouble. So he worked her over but didn’t mess up her face too badly, and Candace was able to work again after only about a week.
She tried another neighborhood and got busted the second night out; paid her own bail, got busted again a week later. Rick got her out of jail — she was coming apart without the H, and he couldn’t risk being implicated. He had his career to think about, and it was thoughtless of Candace to jeopardize his chances through her own sordid lifestyle.
He would have thrown her out, but Candace paid the rent. Of course, he still loved her. But she really ought to take better care of herself. She was letting herself go. Since her herpes scare they seldom made love, although Candace understood that Rick was often emotionally and physically drained after concentrating his energy on some important interview or audition.
They had lived together almost two years, and Candace was almost twenty-five, but she looked almost forty. After a client broke her nose and a few teeth in a moment of playfulness, she lost what little remained of her actress/model good looks.They got the best cosmetic repair she could afford, but after that neither the johns nor the sleaze producers paid her much attention. When she saw herself on the screen at fifth-rate porno houses, in the glimpses between ducking below the rows of shabby seats, she no longer recognized herself.
But Rick’s career was progressing all the while, and that was what made her sacrifice worthwhile. A part of Candace realized now that her dreams of Hollywood stardom had long since w ashed down the gutter, but at least Rick was almost on the verge of big things. He’d landed a number of modeling jobs and already had made some commercials for local TV. Some recent roles in what Rick termed “experimental theater” promised to draw the attention of talent scouts. Neither of them doubted that the Big Break was an imminent certainty. Candace kept herself going through her faith in Rick’s love and her confidence that better times lay ahead. Once Rick’s career took off, she’d quit the streets, get off the drugs. She d look ten years younger if she could just rest and eat right for a few months, get a better repair on her nose. By then Rick would be in a position to help her resume her own acting career.
Candace was not too surprised when Rick came in one morning and shook her awake with the news that he’d lined up a new film for her. It was something about devil worshipers called Satan’s Sluts—X-rated, of course, but the money would be good, and Candace hadn’t appeared even in a peepshow gangbang in a couple months. The producer, Rick explained, remembered her in Camp Hell! and was willing to take a chance on giving her a big role.
Candace might have been more concerned about filming a scene with so small a crew and in a cellar made over into a creepy B&D dungeon, but her last films had been shot in cheap motel rooms with a home video camera. She didn’t like being strapped to an inverted cross and hung before a black-draped altar, but Rick was there — snorting coke with the half-dozen members of the cast and crew.
When the first few whip lashes cut into her flesh, it took Candace’s drugged consciousness several moments to be aware of the pain, and to understand the sort of film for which Rick had sold her. By the time they had heated the branding iron and brought in the black goat, Candace was giving the performance of her life.
She passed out eventually, awoke another day in their bed, vaguely surprised to be alive. It was a measure of Rick’s control over Candace that they hadn’t killed her. No one was going to pay much attention to anything Candace might say — a burned out porno star and drug addict with an arrest record for prostitution. Rick had toyed with selling her for a snuff film, but his contacts there preferred anonymous runaways and wetbacks, and the backers of Satan V Sluts had paid extra to get a name actress, however faded, to add a little class to the production — especially a star who couldn’t cause problems afterward.
Rick stayed with her just long enough to feel sure she wouldn’t die from her torture, and to pack as many of his possessions as he considered worth keeping. Rick had been moving up in the world on Candace’s earnings — meeting the right people, making the right connections. The money from Satan’s Sluts had paid off his debts with enough left over for a quarter-ounce of some totally awesome rock, which had so impressed his friends at a party that a rising TV director wanted Rick to move in with her while they discussed a part for him in a much-talked-about new miniseries.