Girlvert: A Porno Memoir (3 page)

Chapter Three

Dirty Debutante

O
ur
first scene was booked within minutes after taking the Polaroids at World Modeling. Bill, the owner of the agency, made a call to Ed Powers. Ed always got the first scenes of anyone new to the business. He even paid for our HIV testing. Tyler and I would be paid fifteen hundred dollars. It was my suggestion that we should just do a DP. No one objected.

Fifteen hundred dollars! It was the most money I’d ever earned. All of my jobs until then were paid by the hour or in tips. I remember having a five-hundred dollar paycheck once, but I worked day and night at a restaurant for two weeks to get it. Money was never something I could hold on to, either. At eighteen I blew through a twenty-thousand dollar trust that was supposed to be for college. I took out a loan for the education and spent the cash on a car, clothes, and drugs. Then I dropped out of school.

The money was going to be for both of us. Tyler and I would split it, fifty-fifty. We were a team, an equal partnership, even though he was to be paid nothing for acting/fucking in the scene and the check was really only for me. The girls in porn always make more money than the guys. Approximately three times as much. New guys can barely get their foot in the porno door unless there is a new girl getting in with them. Established male producers, directors, and talent want the girls and gigs all to themselves. Everyone wants the new girl. Tyler and I vowed to stay together in scenes, so that both of us were actively participating in this new venture.

Ed normally used only himself in the scenes as the male talent. This was going to be something special. His line of movies,
Dirty Debutantes
, is an amateur video series with the hook being filming first-time-on-camera sex scenes. The video shop where I used to work in Ventura had an adult section that devoted an entire wall to Ed’s
Dirty
Debutantes
. They were yellow boxes with the title and some proletarian photos of girls in need of makeup. These young, corn-fed little girls were pictured having sex with Ed in smaller pictures on the back of the boxes. Though I had shelved porno at the video store, I had never once seen an entire adult film. I’d flipped through
Playboy
, but I could never look at one for too long—my eyeballs would start burning with fascination and confusing disgust mixed with envy. Envy would bubble inside me like natural carbonation.

How insane, they must have thought. Here’s this new girl, and she’s pretty and fresh and sweet, and her first scene is going to be a DP? I was thinking,
First scene? How about last scene?
How am I going to go through with this?
I thought about when I lost my virginity at thirteen. It was my choice to have sex with a boy who was fourteen. Afterward, I was so worried that I was going to look different enough that people would treat me like a slut and a whore. I’ve always had a lot of guilt surrounding my open attitude toward sex. And here I was, about to do porn. It was my choice. I wanted to try it. Still, I felt so damn guilty.

We’d left World Modeling with our porno names Ashley and Trent to protect our true identities. Everyone jokes around with the idea in grade school, like how it has to be your street name and a pet name or middle name. I toyed with the technique, which would have been Rene Sorrento—pretty good, except that I have a cousin named Renee, and I just couldn’t do that to her. I was Ashley Blue, for no deep reason other than that it was different from my own name. Honestly, I thought that using the alias would keep me anonymous. I truly believed that people wouldn’t know it was really me if I changed my name. If anyone asked or accused me of doing a porn, I could just say, “No, look at the name. My name is Oriana Small. That video says Ashley Blue. It’s not me.”

Deciding to do porn was too scary to think about realistically. I knew that my family could never feel good about my chosen profession. Even if it was only going to be temporary, it would be upsetting. My extended family, everyone except for my mother and father, was made up of born again Christians. Every Sunday, they went to church and read the Bible. They would be sad and would pray when they found out I got involved with pornography. It would embarrass them.

However, as gut-wrenching as the idea of my family’s reaction to pornography was, it wasn’t as powerful as the allure. I have never been a good kid. I’ve always
liked
being bad. I practiced smoking cigarettes in the mirror when I was thirteen and was the first girl to have sex in the eighth grade. I was suspended on my first day of high school for smoking, then again for wearing too short a miniskirt. I knew of better ways to behave, but they were not what I preferred. Breaking the rules was much more exciting. Porn was attractive because I knew it was bad. I didn’t know how I could ever face my aunts, uncles, cousins, and sister afterward, or if my actions would force them to stop loving me. I would be a bigger sinner to them, for sure. None of them would believe that this was the best I could do, or that it would make me happy. These relatives all helped raise me when my own parents failed. I didn’t want to disappoint them. But disappointment was inevitable. It felt like I was choosing porn over family, and my old life was ending.

Getting the HIV test was scary. It brought in a true element of danger. It was Tyler’s first one, and my second. The year before, I got tested after taking the morning-after pill. I was nineteen and fucking this older, good-looking Armenian lawyer. When we finished I discovered that the condom was broken and lodged somewhere deep inside of me. I was terrified of unwanted pregnancy.

I don’t know anyone, even now, who gets regular PCR DNA HIV testing done except for porn actors. People who do pornography get them done every thirty days, mandatory. We would have to get used to it. Tyler had a huge fear of needles back then. I only wish he could have held on to some of that fear in the future.

After all of the heavy stuff at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation clinic in Sherman Oaks, just around the corner from World Modeling, we had to go home and celebrate. Ernesto, our neighbor three doors away, was a cocaine dealer. He’d become our close friend and confidante. He was the first person to whom we confessed our new adventure. He didn’t judge or lecture us. Ernesto’s job was way more exploitive and immoral than porn, anyway. The whole thing brought us much closer.

Tyler was the one who really got me into cocaine. I’d tried it once before when I was eighteen. I was standing outside of Club Blue on Las Palmas and jumped into some stranger’s limo. I didn’t think it was all that great because I was already on speed when some old dude told me to close my eyes and take a sniff of blow. I’d been going through some months when I would do speed for a couple of days straight with different people. Thankfully, meth was never a long-term problem for me. Pot is something I’ve detested since my junior year in high school. It bores me. Stimulation, not sedation, was what I was after. I got into those liquor store diet pills called Mini Thins for a semester in junior college. Since they were basically pure ephedra, I developed an eye twitch and chronic dry mouth. Not the sexiest drug to take, but I liked to take drugs. Except heroin and painkillers. And pot.

Tyler kept reassuring me that I would like cocaine. “Just keep trying it. Sometimes it takes people like five times before they really feel it. You’ll love it. Trust me.” He was so right. After we did it together four or five times, I loved it. Cocaine was the best discovery since flavored lip-gloss. It revolutionized my world. It felt amazing. Better than speed, which made me feel dirty and a little isolated. Coke brought the world together. It was a happy drug. I didn’t understand why there was so much propaganda against it. It didn’t seem harmful at all. The coke users we met were young and beautiful, not at all like dirty-ass tweakers. Why didn’t I know about this stuff in high school or elementary school?

Doing coke brought Tyler and me much closer. So did doing ecstasy. We didn’t consider ourselves drunks or druggies, just partiers. We were only after a good time, not a fix. I will honestly say that we were not drug addicts then. In the beginning, it was all very innocent. We had no idea when or how the problem was going to start.

Tyler got some sleep the night before our first scene. I stayed up doing coke the entire time. Our HIV tests results came back negative, thank god. We were scheduled to be at Ed’s house in Northridge in the mid-afternoon. I drove us there. I had no trouble with the idea of driving high. I had just started doing coke on a regular basis a couple months earlier. I hadn’t yet become a paranoid wreck. The world was still just opening up like a bouquet for stargazers. Before we left for the big event, Ernesto extended a line of credit for a couple more grams to take with us. Ernesto was always looking out for us in this way.

Ed’s house was a big, two-story building with a long, winding driveway. It looked like a nice, normal valley home. Any unsuspecting passerby wouldn’t assume that this was the location for about two thousand porno scenes. Nobody knew, as we turned up the driveway that sunny March afternoon, that we were going to shoot for
More Dirty Debutantes Volume 227
.

Ed smiled warmly as he answered the door and led us into his home. He was a fifty year old bachelor pornographer. He looked just like he did on the video boxes, about five-foot-five, bald on top, long, graying stringy hair in the back. His thick eyebrows accentuated his welcoming gestures. He wore round glasses and had a mustache and goatee. He was dressed in a black tee shirt and sweats. He had a belly on him. He used expressions such as “make love” and “climax.” He called himself old-fashioned. The house was large and clean. The clutter around was nothing unusual, just what you would expect from a middle-aged, childless man. Papers on the desks, dressers, and tables. Bad art and ’80s furniture. There weren’t any posters of tits like there were inside World Modeling.

The massive amount of coke I had been doing for the past two days made me jumpy. I was incredibly high. I’m not sure if I would have made it if I hadn’t been on drugs. Coke helped me ignore the risks I was taking. I proceeded without caution. My life was in the moment. Nothing wrong with that, right? Buddhists live their lives that way, like the
om
? I told myself giant heaps of nonsense to rationalize the hazards that I put myself in daily. Ed showed me where to get ready, in his large bathroom upstairs, next to the master bedroom. Perfect, because I had to do some more coke before we started. I stayed in there with the door shut for quite a while, doing line after line and brushing my hair a lot. Tyler joined me for a couple lines and warned me not to do it all. I had a way with coke, usually finishing it all in the first thirty minutes.

My boyfriend led me to where the action was to take place. Ed snapped some photos of us standing side by side with our shirts off, and then he shot some just of me. We might as well have stepped off a Greyhound bus from Arkansas. There was a tripod with a video camera set up, pointed directly at a four-poster bed. It was all completely generic, cheap sheets on the bed. Ed was the king of this amateur formula, and he definitely nailed the décor. I can’t remember what I said in response to the light interview Ed wanted for the intro to the sex. I am sure my nose was red and running the whole time. I was so fucked up and nervous. I just wanted to look good. A lot of the naked bodies on the boxes of porn movies were unflattering. With that camera pointed at me, alone, I was hot and sweaty, the bright lights frozen on my twitchy face. Now I was supposed to tell the camera—and everyone who would watch the video—what my name was, and where I was from. “Ashley, from Southern California,” I said.

When the sex began, I was able to relax. Crazy sex was what I went there to do, and felt more familiar than talking to the camera. My racing mind shut off, and my body came alive. It was hardcore, since that was what Tyler and I liked. He shoved the back of my head as I deep-throated his cock, and then Ed’s. Ed’s cock was extremely small. He was very polite with it, too. He didn’t like any rough stuff. He even wore a condom. Both sex partners stayed completely hard during it all. I was impressed because of Ed’s age and the amount of cocaine Tyler had done before we started. Coke is usually kryptonite to an erection.

It was the ultimate kink experience. I didn’t think I would like porno as much as when we fucked other people at home. The presence of the camera was intimidating and sexy in the same way that a person who was way out of my league was. How did I look in front of it? Was I hot enough for it? Even though I still wasn’t entirely confident about myself, I wanted to be the most beautiful thing that ever fucked. It meant something greater than what we were actually doing. Yeah, the three of us were fucking, but there was going to be an audience for it. In my head, I was everywhere, the future, the present; I was getting fucked while smiling and trying to enjoy myself. This first scene was telling me that I liked doing porn.

Ed’s body wasn’t one I would normally fuck, with that big, white belly. My focus wasn’t on him so much as it was the
idea
of him. I was high and completely into the idea of letting this older guy fuck my ass and pay me for it. It was for a movie. It wasn’t real life. My relationship was with that camera, and I wanted to turn it on and shock it. I wanted to shove it in the faces of everyone who would be watching someday: I was wild, a crazy girl, and I didn’t care. I was an exhibitionist.

Tyler loved to see me get fucked by other guys, so long as he was a part of it. Not only did it bring us together in a new and unusual way, there was just as much importance put on bonding with the other men. Tyler wanted to create and strengthen friendships with the other guys fucking me, in a brotherly or fraternal way. He liked to put the “team” in “tag team.” The size of Ed’s penis definitely gave Tyler a boost of confidence. Maybe that’s why Ed’s movies were so popular, I thought. Every guy watching could feel good about the size of his own cock by watching Ed’s.