Girlvert: A Porno Memoir (16 page)

The fact that I returned to and graduated high school (not on “independent study”) was miraculous. My mom never made me go to school. I ditched all the time. She was so out of it she never even knew when I was in the house. She let me get tattooed at fifteen. I got picked up by the cops pretty regularly for alcohol and curfew violations. I chain-smoked and drank hard alcohol until I was sick. I came and went with my friends as I pleased. It wasn’t a real home for me. Just a place I had to live.

My mother always had an excuse, a reason, for poisoning herself in all of these ways: to deal with the pain of being alive.

No matter how much I tried to assert my individuality, I ended up being like her. I was a rebel
like
her. I started to take drugs. They started out as something fun, just like they probably had for Cheryl. Then I turned to them when everything was going wrong. My mother ruined her life because she never stopped using.

Now, Cheryl lives just down the street from my sister. When we talk about it all, my sister, with an even, noble tone, suggests, “Just wait until you have kids, Ori. You will understand how much it hurts when a child turns their shoulder to their mother.”

Each day I get older and closer to understanding my own mortality, I think of my mother’s life. She was a vibrant person once.

When I was a child I often wondered,
If I am unable to take care of myself when I grow up, will all I need to do is shack up with some asshole and get wasted to survive?
But I never fully fed into the legacy. Tyler had his faults, and we had our chemical fun, but the reciprocity of love was more than maybe even I give it credit. I do, however, think my mom definitely contributed to my drug addiction. She and I did drugs together until I stopped.

But only her good characteristics influenced me—gave me the balls, so to speak—to get into porn. She showed me D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin when I was a kid, and my sexual life, for pleasure and for work, has been its own poetry. My mother was open about sex, positively. And she was the life of the party. In her better days, she taught me a fun way of being, by example. Her FUCK YOU, DONT TELL ME WHAT TO DO attitude built me to be bold enough to start doing porn, and I thank her for that.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Christmas Vacation

T
yler
and I flew to Houston for Christmas. I didn’t want to stay long, maybe just a few days. He threw a tantrum when I said this, so we booked a trip for ten days. Ten days is a very long time to spend in Texas. It becomes eternal when you have to lie about the fact that you’re doing porno—and perhaps extends somewhere beyond eternity when it’s an open secret.

Tyler’s mother, Cheryl, picked us up from the airport. From the backseat, on the way to her house, Tyler could no longer stand the secrecy. We’d only been with his mom for ten minutes, and he had to spill it to her, a nice little speech.

“I have a little confession to make,” he blurted, smiling. “I haven’t been selling cars. Ori and I have been doing some adult movies. But don’t you worry. We really like it and we’re doing well in it. Best jobs we ever had. So, please, don’t be mad or anything. I love you.”

I cowered in my shell like a tortoise. As bad as the lies were, I preferred them to bearing the consequences of the truth.

Tyler’s mother listened calmly from behind the driver’s seat, eyes succinctly on the road ahead. There was a little silence as we waited for her verbal response. She sighed and said, “I know. I’ve known for a little while. Desiree told me.”

Tyler wasn’t angry, maybe a little shocked. But I was angry. “Well, what do you think about it?” Tyler said. He was looking for some approval from his mother. I could understand that. No matter how shitty parents might be, you still want them to love and accept you.

“Scooter, I don’t really like it. You’re an adult, and you make your own decisions. But if you’re happy, then I’m happy.”

He was relieved. Her voice was ill-equipped for strong, maternal guidance. She just answered flatly. She wasn’t upset at us. That was all Tyler needed. But we soon found out that nearly everyone in Tyler’s family knew about it. All his cousins, aunts, and uncles. They all agreed not to tell his grandparents or littlest sister.

Tyler’s mother acted as though she didn’t want to get her hands dirty by talking about it, this pornography business we’d gotten into. She’d had no problem asking us for two thousand dollars just a couple months prior. While Desiree was staying with us on her last visit, Cheryl called Tyler in a panic. She was going to lose her house and needed two grand right away. Tyler told me to give it to him. I hesitated, but I gave him the money, and Tyler sent Desiree home with a check. She said she’d pay it back but so far hadn’t mentioned it at all. When Cheryl told us in the car that she’d known about the porn for a “little while,” it dawned on me. She’d already known how we made our money when she asked for the loan. Not repaying it was her way of maintaining a twisted moral high ground, taking a fucked-up ethical stance. She ended up ripping us off. She ripped me off, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Desiree apologized for outing our secret. It was okay. She was just a kid. There were no hard feelings between us. She was having a rough time. Since we last saw her she’d put on twenty pounds. On her last visit to LA, she’d filled out and looked great. Now her depression and withdrawal were showing. Meth had screwed her up, and now its absence screwed her up even more. If she couldn’t get high, all she wanted to do was eat. Eating made her fat, which only led to more sadness. The obsession I have with my own eating issues heightened my empathy for Desiree. Tyler and I wanted to help her. We took her out with us and offered to pay for a gym membership for her. We both felt guilty about her condition.

Tyler and I only stayed with his mom, sisters, and stepdad the first night of our trip. The rest of the time, we were at his grandparents’ house. We golfed with granddad Emmett, went Christmas shopping with grandmom Naomi, and to a holiday dinner at his aunt’s house. By day, we did all of the normal stuff people do when they go home to visit for the holidays.

By night, we made ourselves at home in Texas as much as we could. We’d bought even more coke and ecstasy than usual to stay in the Christmas spirit. Tyler and I went out into Houston every night with some of his hometown friends. Tyler’s grandparents lived in a suburb twenty minutes outside of the city. One of our many destinations was JR’s, a gay country-western bar. The first night, I didn’t have an ID with me, but since I was a woman they let me in after I paid a sixty dollar cover charge. Tyler bought pills off some dude in the bathroom. All of us swallowed a couple, and I don’t remember much from that point on. The nights in Houston blended together into one bandaged-up sock monkey.

The order isn’t clear, but all of these things did happen during our nights in Houston: A drag queen karaoke contest going on in the back room of JR’s. Tyler almost getting into a fight outside the club. A lot of driving around high with a lot of people. A foursome that included a crazy stripper who bit me on the neck and shoulders, leaving nasty purple and red bruises on my skin. A trip to a stranger’s house to buy some more drugs.

One night ended when we bought a couple shitty eight balls of coke from a sketchy bar dude. It was probably ninety-nine percent baby laxative. We couldn’t keep going on it. Life was troubling when it was morning at Tyler’s grandparents’ house and we were on ecstasy and had been on it all night and were supposed to be bright and shiny people at breakfast.

“Hey, do you want to smoke this crap?” Tyler asked.

“What, like crack? How do you do that if it’s powder?”

“I know how to make it. I learned it from the
Anarchist Cookbook
. All we need is some baking soda.”

We got up and floated to the pantry. “Grandmom? Where’s the baking soda?”

“It’s on the shelf, next to the rice, baby.” Tyler’s grandmother was such a lovely southern lady.

Tyler grabbed a candle from his great-grandmother’s bathroom. He mixed the coke and baking soda together in a spoon and held it over the flame to cook. We were making crack cocaine as if it were some children’s science experiment. But we did not yield rocks. Our crack balls were lumpy and wet. We sucked at the simple chemistry it supposedly takes to make crack out of baby-shit powder, and it was too goddamned funny.

Desiree showed up. “What are you doing?” The coke was out and she saw that we were cooking something on a spoon.

“Making crack,” I laughed hysterically. “Here, you try it!” I handed her the spoon with our works on it. She enthusiastically took the utensil and started her own batch of crack balls. They were supposed to be rocks, but every single one of ours were balls. They wouldn’t dry properly, probably because of our shitty coke.

“Let’s smoke them!” Desiree said.

“Out of what? How can we make a crack pipe?” I asked.

“Out of an antenna,” Tyler said.

“Or, with this,” Desiree said. She unscrewed a lightbulb. “I’ve smoked crystal out of lightbulbs lots of times.” She broke off the metal part very carefully. “Scooter, go get me some salt.” She poured salt into the bulb to clean off the white tint that was on the inside. When it was all clear, she dropped one of the crack balls into the broken bulb. She rolled up a dollar bill and stuck it in her mouth for a straw as she lit the bottom of her new pipe with a lighter. The crack was supposed to cook and smoke inside, but it wouldn’t. The plan was a failure.

If we hadn’t been high on ecstasy, we would have never even thought to smoke crack, let alone try to make it. But crack had been in our minds since we’d visited Tyler’s biological father the day before. His name was Eddie and he’d just gotten out of prison for using heroin. Eddie was a very sweet, dear man. He looked exactly like Tyler in the face. He was much shorter than Tyler, though. I think being in a Texas prison for ten years probably shrunk him. Eddie was a sad guy.

Until the age of eighteen, Tyler didn’t know that Eddie was his real father. The man who’d raised Tyler as his son, and even given him his same name, disowned him when he found out the results of a DNA test. The test was done without Tyler’s knowledge. One day, his father asked him to swab his cheek with a Q-Tip for medical insurance purposes. Days later, Tyler was told that he wasn’t his father’s son. His mother had lied to him for his entire eighteen years. Eddie was in prison when Tyler first found out. So, during that ten-day stay in Texas, we met up with Eddie at a billiard bar. We drank Coors Lights while Tyler tried to get to know his dad. They did their best to bond in this short amount of time. Tyler asked Eddie if we could get some coke, so we could do lines and talk over at his place. Eddie couldn’t get coke. He could get some crack. We settled for two twenty-dollar bags of crack. Each had two rocks in it.

Eddie rented a room at his mother’s house in Houston. He had to live with her because of his parole. Eddie had been in and out of prison for over twenty years. I thought he was too good-natured to deserve prison for his weaknesses.

I’d never bought or smoked crack before. I was freaking out. “Tyler, I don’t feel comfortable. Crack is bad. I don’t want to be here doing this.” I was scared to be in this strange house and doing drugs with a repeat offender, no matter how endearing.

“Ori. He’s my dad! I just want to spend time with him. If he wants to smoke crack, we’ll smoke crack. Don’t be so fucking selfish.”

Eddie was getting his crack pipe from its hiding place. It was a glass tube with a piece of steel wool stuck in the end. He pushed in the crack rock and lit it up. Tyler and his dad took turns passing the pipe back and forth. I gave in and took a couple hits. I felt scummy. And it didn’t even get me high.

Tyler and I cried when we were done visiting Eddie. We lay down in his twin bed at his grandparents’ house and sobbed ourselves to sleep. I cried for Tyler and Eddie. I also cried for my own mother and myself. Having an addict for a parent hurts all the time, but it’s mostly a silent pain, a pain similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s colorless, odorless, and can quietly fill the air around you and make you sick, gradually. We try to put it out of our minds and carry on independently, but it never stops seeping in.

We had a few days to go before we could finally leave Texas. It was New Year’s Eve. Tyler took me out to a charming French bistro in Houston. The menu was superb. Tyler was in an especially lavish mood and explained to me in detail about all the different dishes. I had grilled fish and Tyler had a steak. We drowned ourselves in red wine. At the end of the meal, Tyler ordered champagne, two flutes of the finest the waiter could muster. A candle lit up our faces in the dark of the table.

Then Tyler pulled out a little black fuzzy box.

“Ori, will you marry me?” he asked, on one knee, in the middle of the room. There were tears in his eyes, and hope.

I nodded, “Yes.” Tyler picked me up and hugged me as the restaurant cheered us on. It was a proud moment for Tyler and a spectacle for me. The little platinum diamond ring slid onto my finger. It was a perfect fit.

Right away, Tyler called his family. “She said yes!” he shouted on several different phone calls. I watched him and cried with a smile. However, I wasn’t completely sure about it. To be honest, I had dreaded the day Tyler would do this. I didn’t want to get married to him. I didn’t have the faith in our relationship he seemed to have, even though I loved him desperately.

Both of us agreed we wouldn’t get married for a while. I wanted to put it off as long as possible. We both needed time to grow up before doing such an adult thing like getting married.

I was afraid of marrying Tyler because he had fallen behind me in terms of maturity. When we first met, I looked up to him. Now all I did was take care of him. He didn’t take care of me enough, and I did not think he ever would. It was wrong of me not to have had the balls to tell him this when he proposed. But we were in his hometown and staying with his family; if I’d said no, it would have been a huge drama. I knew the ring came from his grandmother. There was no way I could disappoint them all. I’ll wait until later to tell him, I thought. There was no right later time to tell him I didn’t want to get married. We returned to LA and had to pack up again to go to Las Vegas. The big porno convention was held there every year, and I was asked to attend.

After a week in Vegas, we came home only to start packing again, but not for a trip. We said goodbye to our old Hollywood studio apartment and the neighborhood streetwalkers and relocated to Tarzana.

For a mere fifteen hundred a month, Pro Trusion offered to rent us the same townhouse he’d choked me in. Tyler insisted we take it. I went along, once again.