Girlvert: A Porno Memoir
Read Girlvert: A Porno Memoir Online
Authors: Oriana Small
THIS IS A GENUINE BARNACLE BOOK
This is a work of nonfiction. The author has done her best to tell this story the way it happened and, in some cases, clear up standing misconceptions and misunderstandings. Events and actions have been retold to the best of her accurate ability. Conversations presented in dialogue form have been re-created based on the author’s memory of them, but they are not intended to represent word-for-word documentation of what was said; rather, they are meant to evoke the substance of what was actually said. Also, in the interest of privacy and to protect the innocent and the guilty, the majority of the names have been changed.
A Barnacle Book
453 South Spring Street, Suite 531
Los Angeles, CA 90013
abarnaclebook.com
davenaz.com/oriana
askori.com
Copyright © 2011 by Oriana Small
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address:
A Barnacle Book Subsidiary Rights Department
453 South Spring Street, Suite 531
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Cover illustration by Corey Smith
B&W photos by Dennis McGrath
Design by Tamra Rolf
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Print Data
Small, Oriana, 1981—
Girlvert: A Porno Memoir / by Oriana Small AKA Ashley Blue
1. Small, Oriana, 1981— 2. Porn actress—United States—Biography.
3. Ashley Blue (alias)
Includes Select Filmography (p. 306)
ISBN-13: 9780982505687
The woman inspects her hand. She holds it away from her face and looks at it as if it does not quite belong to her, as if its history is something she has read. Thirty-two years before, the hand had gone into her mouth regularly.
—BEN GREENMAN, “
Her Hand (Atlanta, 2015)
”
GIRLVERT
a porno memoir
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Modeling and Recreational Sex
“FIGURE MODELS NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
WORLD MODELING…”
T
his
was the ad. I was dissecting the classified section of the
Los Angeles Daily News
. The paper was spread out all over the carpet of my studio apartment. I was living in a raunchy part in Hollywood. Transvestite prostitutes worked the street outside my window. It was three in the afternoon. I read each of the ads twice, desperately searching for my next potential workplace failure and limiting my focus to any job not requiring previous experience. I kept coming back to this one:
World Modeling
. The word scared me though,
modeling
. Who exactly did I think I was, responding to a modeling ad?
I hung up on the guy who answered the first time I dialed this so-called World Modeling office. I gathered the guts to speak and tried again. I hadn’t expected a guy to be answering the phone at a modeling agency. The smooth-operating actor’s voice on the other end told me to come in for a consultation, if I was interested.
“Just like that?” I said. “Don’t you want to know what I look like first? I could be five hundred pounds for all you know.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just come into our office, and we’ll talk more about it. I can explain more when you get here.” His voice was so overtly persuasive that it struck me as suspiciously sleazy.
I was nervous. This was a stupid idea. They’re going to say no. Definitely. Maybe they will say something worse. I’ll be a laughing stock. Long after I leave their offices, they’ll still be joking about how
I
came in to apply. What if they told me I was too short? Or too fat! Not once in my life has anyone told me I could be a model. It was an entirely far-fetched dream for a girl as average as me,
medium
in every way. I was neither tall nor gorgeous, big-eyed nor buxom…I would call myself
cute
, at best.
As I drove down the 101, the thought occurred to me: Maybe I could just model my feet. My feet look pretty good. But then I remembered the hair on my toes. And my second toe is noticeably longer than my big toe. Models have to be perfect, right? No modeling agency would give me a shot in hell. It would end in disappointment.
On the Van Nuys exit, I began to brace myself for the blow. I rehearsed what I was going to say when these people told me, “Sorry, you just don’t have the right requirements to be a model. Come back when you’ve grown about a foot taller, midget!”
But, oh, how I needed a job! I’d been fired, asked to quit, and just plain not shown up (my favorite technique) for my last four jobs, all in only five months time. I’d recently quit Moorpark Community College after already dropping out of art school in San Francisco, had moved out of my aunt and uncle’s home in Thousand Oaks, and I was on my own. I hated Thousand Oaks. It was stale, and all of the people in it were stale. Going to class seemed like a waste. I wanted to figure out all the answers to life on my terms. I knew where I could find them. I moved to Hollywood. What can I say. I was young.
I fantasized about being a Hollywood burnout or a rock groupie, someone who eclipsed herself before the age of thirty. I was too young, perhaps too shallow, to understand anything beyond skin-deep attraction and barfly philosophies. Work was not my number one priority in life. Going out, partying, and having fun came before anything else. And my idea of having fun consisted of experimenting with drugs and having sex with older men. Even if they weren’t conventionally handsome, I always found something appealing about the older guys I slept with. Anything from the way their musky armpits smelled to an out-of-state accent. There was no rhyme or reason to my selection. Most of them were one-night stands, unless they had a big dick. I liked that.
Ever since high school, I was really into one-night-only sexual encounters. It could be as little as a make-out session or a blowjob. I loved meeting new men and going off somewhere to have sex. I never thought of it as “giving it up.” I got something out of it, too. Instead of orgasms, I received knowledge. I was learning about men’s bodies, and I was learning about my own body. Sex gave me a feeling of power. Sex
is
power. Sex made me feel pretty, wanted, needed, and smart. I did all I could to make those feelings stronger.
I have never been good at hiding my feelings—or ignoring them—and one thing I felt for certain was that the traditional service industry—waitressing, secretarial work, even lobbying/political activism—was not for me.
The modeling agency was on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I’d envisioned a tall, professional building with sleek, tinted glass on the outside. Imagining it, I could almost smell the spacious, fashionably decorated lobby, the waiting area full of headshots and résumés. I parked on the street, looking for it. I was so full of nervous energy that I forgot to pay the meter.
The building—the building in my mind—was not there. Instead, the door to World Modeling led up some ratty carpeted stairs above a corridor between two other equally questionable businesses. I couldn’t even ascertain what kind of establishments they were. The signs on the building’s façade were too old and faded. I had noticed an adult video shop on the corner. Sherman Oaks
sounds
nice, but Van Nuys Boulevard is still Van Nuys Boulevard: a good place to disappear to if you want to run away from home and live a miserable life. Ride the bus and do heroin.
I was wearing a cute little lavender dress and heeled sandals. I felt pretty. My skin was clear. Twenty year old, fresh-faced Oriana Rene Small. I took a deep breath before I opened the door to the suite.
Instead of inhaling an atmosphere of professional paper scents—magazine proofs and photographers’ contact sheets—I took in a breath of cigarette smoke mingled with layers of dust and grime. Meekly, I pushed the door all the way open and found myself wrong on all counts about absolutely everything I’d imagined this to be. Covering every inch of wall space were pictures of female porno stars. Porn movie posters proudly and loudly blanketed the entire office. Several of them blazoned “Nikita Denise.” It wasn’t a small place but was so full of tits, G-strings, made-up faces, and big flouncy hair that it seemed to be caving in. There was a disgusting, torn-up, shabby brown couch. Two people sat on it, young and immoral-looking. I wondered if this place also casted for
Cops
.
An oily, tan-faced man behind one of the many desks welcomed me. He was the one I talked to on the phone: Tyler. My boyfriend’s name was Tyler. I cautiously sat down in a chair in front of his desk. If there was anything filthy or smelly on the seat, I didn’t want it sticking to me. I wished I could hover.
“Oriana, a pleasure.”
“What kind of modeling is this, Tyler?”
He looked at me in all seriousness. “Call me Ty. We do primarily adult casting.”
“Is this PORN?” I wanted to be polite, but I was fucking freaking. The obvious was too strange here. My underarms soaked with sweat.
“Yes. This is porn. If you want to get started, let me have a form of picture ID so I can make a copy. I,” he cleared his throat, “of course need to make sure that you’re at least eighteen years of age. Then, fill this out, and when you’re ready, we’ll go into the next room and take some Polaroids.”
“You want me to take my clothes off? Here? Are you serious?” I didn’t like being naked in a doctor’s office.
“Yeah, we’ll just be in that room, right over there,” he pointed. “We can shut the door, if you’d like.”
There were two or three more men behind desks, carrying on with business calls. I shut my ears to what they were saying. Already, my conscience had to be cleared of this experience. I got up, clutching my purse and my stomach. I am abrupt by nature, but I didn’t even try to be polite. I was dizzy and fumbling. My face was completely red. I didn’t know what to say, how to react. All I could muster was the same awkward smile I always resort to in awkward situations. I felt shame just being in the presence of these people.
“I’m sorry, I have to go. I can’t do this right now. I have to think about this. I…I have to talk about it with my boyfriend. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to waste your time. His name is Tyler. Um, like yours. His name. My boyfriend’s name is Tyler. Ah, bye.”
Guilt was leading into shock and my face burned with embarrassment. What have I done? I thought. This was wrong! Oh, I am such a bad person!
I should have never come here
, I repeated in my head over and over, hoping that would make the huge new scarlet letter “P” on my chest disappear. P for PORNOGRAPHY. However, it was not a simple guilt. I was ashamed partly because porn was supposed to be an evil, vile thing, but moreover, I was ashamed because deep down inside, it turned me on. Coinciding with my shock and surprise, I was allured. I don’t think I realized it as I shot out the door, eyes averted to everyone else’s in the room, but I was not going to be able to put this newly discovered world behind me.
I fled the building, hurrying down the dingy stairway. I stepped out on the sidewalk, looking down and turning my head away from the cars on the street. I didn’t want anyone to see me leaving that place. The guy—Ty—the way he said “This is porn” so matter-of-factly, made me feel suddenly and completely ignorant. Of course some open-call advertisement in the very back of a city newspaper is not going to be for real models. “Figure modeling”—come on! I was just some medium-sized idiot with an outlandish hope that I could land a legitimate modeling job.
No, it had to be something else for me. For some rare, minority breed of women, it’s the high fashion catwalk. For the rest of us, it’s porn.
My stomach was a wreck. The nervousness made me sweat; my armpits were reeking over my Teen Spirit deodorant. I ran the last yards to my car in horror. In addition to a spasm of diarrhea threatening my bowels, I now had a motherfucking parking ticket. Tyler!—I frantically called my boyfriend while driving back from the valley. I must have sounded like someone who had narrowly escaped abduction.
I pulled my little white Toyota Corolla into the single parking spot at our apartment. Tyler was waiting for me outside, his big brown eyes wide with worry. The diarrhea was explosive. Everything—body and mind—was shaken up. I told Tyler about stumbling upon the porno agency. My shock was at a crescendo, and was complicated by my compulsion to share with Tyler my brewing revelation that I had to go back. I was flustered and confused about it all the way home. A darker side of me wanted to know more, more, more. I couldn’t understand exactly why at that time. All I knew was that I could not find out alone.
“My god, baby. What happened?”
Tyler was sweet, and I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone before him. He loved me with the same intensity. He was for the most part a caring boyfriend, and he was sincerely alarmed at what appeared to be a serious trauma. How was I going to explain to him where I’d been without feeling stupid for thinking that it was a real modeling agency to begin with? Would he believe me? He might think I went on purpose!—and be disgusted, thinking I was a whore. I felt like I had auditioned to be a prostitute, just like the working girls outside our window. And how, above all else, could I explain the confusing and complex notion that the whole experience was turning me on? But I had to take that chance and tell him. This wouldn’t be the first time I would be found guilty of possessing a wandering eye. I’d been told already once before, “No more lies.”
I had once cheated on Tyler, and I didn’t tell him or anyone else about it. I thought he would never know, and therefore it would never hurt him. We’d only been dating for about three months. He was so fucking sexy, slim, over six feet tall with a megawatt smile and big, pouty lips. He was the boy of my dreams. We moved in together only weeks after we first met at a gay club on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was love at first sight. I dumped the boyfriend I was with at the time over the phone the day after I met Tyler.
Still, I cheated on him. I loved him. He was romantic, handsome, artistic, and charming. Before Tyler, I had never taken any relationship seriously. I was only twenty years old, and there were a lot of dudes around. My mom used to cheat on my dad, and she was a liar, too. It’s just part of being a woman, I thought.
Tyler found out I fucked my ex because he read it in my diary. I didn’t think he was sneaky enough to do something like read my private diary. He must have had his suspicions. I wrote all about it and how bad, guilty, and good it felt to secretly fuck this other guy. The other man, my ex, had a big dick, and he was thirty-six years old. He was a kind of father figure. He loaned me the money to get into my Hollywood apartment, but he wasn’t a sugar daddy. He made me pay all of the money back in full. I’d promised Tyler I’d never cheat on or lie to him again. I had to tell him I was in Sherman Oaks talking to a porno agent, because the percolating excitement of it all made me feel as though I had cheated on him—the same mix of guilt and pleasure.
“I saw an ad for models wanted in the
Daily News
. So, I went to their office today. I just went to talk to them, for a meeting, and so, I go in…and, well, it was…
porn!
” My voice was shaky, barely audible. I didn’t want to say it too loud. Someone in our building might hear.
“Are you serious? You’re fucking kidding me! You swear?” He was smiling ear-to-ear and then busted out laughing. “No way!”
I grabbed onto him, and he hugged me. He didn’t show disgust or call me a whore and he didn’t even accuse or suspect me of doing anything with the guys that worked at the agency. He wasn’t angry or condemning. He was happy. Thrilled. Ecstatic and excited, to be exact. He
did
think I went to audition for porn on purpose, and he was happy about it.
“That’s so funny! Oh, you’re upset. It’s okay, don’t worry. So what? Okay, I believe you, you didn’t realize you were going to end up at a porn office. That’s great!”