Girlvert: A Porno Memoir (8 page)

Chapter Eleven

Gonorrhea

I
t
happened only two months after we started doing porn. While HIV tests once a month were mandatory, back in 2002, the syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea testing was free but optional. Tyler and I decided to get tested for all four diseases. Give us the works, the full panel! We felt proud to be doing at least one healthy thing for our bodies. “It’s the right thing to do,” we said. “We have to take care of ourselves now that we are in porn.”

The results came back a week later. HIV: negative. Syphilis: negative. Gonorrhea and chlamydia both came back positive. We got a courtesy telephone call from the Adult Industry Medical clinic. They needed us to come in and get medicated. They also needed us to give to them a list of the people we’d had sex with in the last month. I wanted to die. I felt so filthy, from the inside out. Welcome to porn.

I must have wailed “Oh my god, Tyler,” over and over, for hours. We sat on the floor of our apartment feeling stunned and sorry for ourselves. “Why did we have to get this? Why?”

“Well, we fucked a lot of people,” Tyler said. “It’s normal, I guess. I mean, to get this stuff in porn. I mean, we were going to get it sooner or later. Everybody does.”

It is not normal to fuck more than ten or twenty different people in a month. You catch stuff called gonorrhea. What was it? Was it diarrhea in your pussy? It was awful to dissect all the ways I felt I had become so sickening. I wanted to hide from the daylight people. People who got up before noon and went to work, people whose job liabilities did not include the risk of gonorrhea.
We are no longer allowed in society
, I thought to myself,
we’re being punished
. This was karma for staying up all night every night doing cocaine and having threesomes. Waking up at 3:00 p.m. and doing porn has consequences. They are called gonorrhea and chlamydia.

“Look, Ori. Calm down. It’s going to be all right. We just have to go in and get some medication. At least this is curable. We don’t have AIDS. We’re lucky.”

“Lucky? I don’t feel lucky! And I don’t want to talk about or think about the possibility of us catching AIDS. That’s awful, Tyler! Don’t say that! I can’t fucking handle the thought of that.” I was throwing a complete fit. I rolled around on the floor on my back, crying and kicking my feet. All my life, I’ve gotten the most out of good tantrums. As a kid, they felt so viscerally good. Now when they happen, they’re cathartic.

Tyler got up off the floor and walked into the bathroom to pee. I remained on the carpet, being morbid and negative. When he stepped out of the bathroom, he had a frown on his face.

“Um, I think I feel it. My dick doesn’t feel right. It’s hurting to take a piss right now. I think we should hurry up and get that medicine. Get up!” Now he was worried. So much for being the calm one. “Ori! Come on! I’m fucking serious! My dick hurts. We need to get there by five, hurry up!”

I was contemplating the devastating scenario of Tyler and me catching AIDS. We’d be shunned from everyone in porn. Our faces would be all over the news. We would have to live in an assisted living establishment because no one would want to help take care of us. Suicide would be the only solution.

“Ori, my dick feels really weird! Look at it!” he shouted, not in anger, but with fear. He’d shuffled out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. The cock looked tiny and frail. The white briefs he was wearing had yellowish green stains on the crotch.

“Ew, Tyler. What’s that? Is that why they call it the drip?” I was probably the one who gave it to him, and he was feeling all the symptoms. I didn’t have any. Who knows how long I had been infected. It didn’t even burn when I peed. There were no yellow or green stains on my panties.

We decided our gonorrhea and chlamydia were good excuses to leave town. That night, after getting the medication from Sherman Oaks, we drove to Houston. I have always had warm feelings about Texans. My dad’s family all live in Texas, but I don’t speak to them. Maybe it’s more like they don’t speak to me. I haven’t seen my father since he disappeared when I was fourteen. But I lived with him in Texas, briefly. It was in a town called Pflugerville, just outside of Austin.

Tyler and I made it to Houston the next morning. We drove all night, through the darkest parts of New Mexico and West Texas. We did cocaine the entire drive, so we were paranoid about every single light we saw in the middle of the desert. There were dozens of tiny red flashing ones. We were convinced we were being tracked by UFOs.

Tyler’s grandparents let us stay with them. They had a neat 1970s house that reminded me of
The Brady Bunch
. Tyler’s grandmother made us Frito pie. We stayed in Tyler’s old room, which was right next to his great-grandmother’s room. Tyler had been raised by his grandparents, Emmett and Naomi. They called him Scooter. I thought it was darling. He had such a loving family. The only thing wrong with them that I could see was that they were solid George Bush and George W. Bush fans.

We stayed at Tyler’s grandparents’ house for five days. That was how long our gonorrhea and chlamydia lasted. It was a pleasant way to live through the duration of our STDs, except for the constant lies we told to all of Tyler’s family. Why did we have so much money? How did our jobs allow us to take off for five days on such short notice? What exactly did each of us do? I couldn’t take being around Tyler’s family for very long because it felt too awful to lie. And it was too hard to keep track. Was I a secretary, a personal assistant, or a production assistant? Did Tyler sell cars or was he in sales? Did I get a big tax refund, or did I have a trust fund? We kept on having to go into detail with the lies, which accidentally got changed from person to person sometimes. We lied to everyone but Tyler’s younger sister, Desiree. She’d already witnessed firsthand what we did.

Desiree had come to visit us for the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a giant gathering in the desert outside of Los Angeles. Coachella was a major reason Tyler and I continued to do porn. Tickets for the thing were rather pricey, and we were so hungry to attend that we used it to justify selling our bodies. The event takes place every year in April. We began doing porn in March. Porno funded our party pilgrimage. We could buy as much coke and ecstasy as we needed, which was a couple thousand dollars’ worth. I remember saying how exciting it was to see all of these infamous bands. Now, I can’t even remember who played.

We flew Desiree out from Houston. She and Tyler had the same mother, but different fathers. Half-siblings, like me and my sisters. Tyler’s mom was married more times than my mother, but they are both named Cheryl. Desiree looked like her mother in the face. She was pale and very pretty. Her eyebrows were severely plucked, but she had big, blue eyes and a perfectly straight nose. Her whole family treated her like she was much older than seventeen. She quit going to high school but claimed she was on “independent study.” I knew what that meant. It’s a legal version of her mother letting her drop out of school. My mom did the same thing and put me in the “independent study” program when I was the same age. It’s for mothers who just give up making their kids go to school when parenting becomes too tough for them.

Before I met Desiree, I imagined her to be this hard-ass and worldly woman. She had a job as a hostess at some fancy restaurant in Houston—something I could never handle. I did the same type of job and got fired for sleeping at the front desk, just prior to entering porn. Desiree was also a full-time drug dealer. She used and sold crystal methamphetamine. Tyler was proud of her for her street smarts and for making so much money at such a young age. Desiree was proud of her business, too. She and Tyler spoke often on the phone. They were close. I’m sure she knew that he sold hash in Barcelona while he was going to culinary school, but I’m not sure if she knew about the D
r
¯
a
no acid he’d sold to the neighborhood schoolchildren. She looked up to him and found nothing wrong with making extra cash just like her big brother. She even sent us some product in the mail. As a surprise, Desiree would call the night before to tell us a present was coming. The next day, a FedEx envelope would arrive at our doorstep. I’d even signed for it. Delivered to our door with love, a bag of crystal meth and a couple bars of Xanax!

Bringing Desiree to LA was our way of saying thanks for all the packages of drugs she sent us out of the kindness of her little Texan heart. We never gave her any money for the meth she sent because we hardly had enough to pay our bills at the time. That was all over now—being broke was a thing of the past. Porno economy. There would be no limits to spending on all the fun we could have.

Desiree was a sweet little girl. I was taken aback by how young she really was. Her baby face was seventeen, no matter how much crystal she was doing. She tried to like me, but I could tell she didn’t trust me. Tyler told her I was a cheater, and that spoiled any chances of our being friends. It must have been so strange for her while Tyler tried to explain and substantiate the fact we did porn. She didn’t want to hear it, but she nodded and smiled, accepting it. I was so wrapped up in my own battles with morality that I didn’t really think about her well-being too much. The fact that she was seventeen and visiting us to hang out and do drugs should have been a bigger issue than my doing porn. Desiree said she could handle herself and had her life under control. Only three years older than her, I was the furthest thing from a good example. I tried to respect her decisions. She wanted to quit school and sell drugs.

Within the first hour of hanging out in our apartment, Desiree and Tyler taught me how to smoke crystal meth. Desiree fashioned a foil pipe into something that looked like an aluminum volcano. Tyler hollowed out a cheap ballpoint pen that served as a straw. Using the straw, we three chased the dragon together. After one of us lit the meth, melting it, we would take turns sucking up the smoke. The effects of smoking it, as opposed to sniffing lines, were much stronger. It smelled like a smokestack from a plastic factory. The smoke was a light grey and I could definitely taste every single chemical when it filled up my mouth. I tried to hold it in as long as I could, because that supposedly got you higher. Smoking meth made my whole body numb and light, without the burn that comes from sniffing it. It turned my brain into a ball of helium and lifted my body off the floor.

For days, the three of us smoked crystal, did coke, ate ecstasy, and drank booze. We made it out to the concert, four hours away near Palm Springs. I really can’t remember much, but I do have some snapshots from the trip. We look fucked up and very happy. Desiree, Tyler, and I are so skinny holding on to each other in the photos. A group of degenerates. Tyler’s eyes are half open and rolling back into his skull. We all have maniacal smiles on our mouths. It was supposed to be a good time. We had all the drugs we could possibly want.

On the third day of her visit, I had a shoot in Woodland Hills. It was for a movie called
Grrl Power
. My call time wasn’t until the afternoon. It didn’t really matter, because I was planning on being late. I was a few hours late, in fact. Tyler and Desiree dropped me off at the location. We were all super high on ecstasy, too out of it to leave Desiree at home alone. I didn’t feel good. But the director and production manager told me I was fine, so Tyler and Desiree left. It was probably for the best. Having an underage girl at a porn shoot could get everyone arrested. I stayed there to do my scene, but I was rolling so hard I could barely open my eyes during the stills. I’d already gotten the cold shoulder from the makeup artist.

Two different men on set lectured me about taking drugs before scenes and how it looked bad. They asked me what I was on and I told them, “Mmmm, ecstasy…” But I had no idea who they were or why anyone cared. This was porno, right? I was on the road to ruin, not success! Not one part of me felt guilty or sorry for doing drugs. I was a total mess, but they shot me anyway. I did a great scene, despite the bad looks and worse vibes I got from the entire crew. They were happy when I left. Tyler picked me up a few hours later, without Desiree. The director wrote out my check and told Tyler not to let me take as many pills next time.

When our infections cleared up, I was ready to leave Texas. We could retest and go back to work seven days after starting the antibiotics. We needed to get back to LA All of our shoots were rescheduled because of the STDs. No one in porno really cared that we got sick. Everyone was very sympathetic and understanding. We were not ostracized or treated poorly because of it. I was looking forward to going back. Porno had become the world in which we thrived.

After not being able to talk about porn and our involvement in it for so many days, I began to miss it dearly. I wanted nothing more than to speak freely about it and not have to hide from it. Even if I wasn’t proud of it or bragging about it, I wanted to be able to mention it if I wished. Tyler and I needed to get back where things were happening. LA was where people would be open-minded again. Where the Republicans were outnumbered and the weather was nice. Home to cocaine and pornography. Home to Trent and Ashley. Home, where we fit in. Hollywood. Home.

Chapter Twelve

Heart Attack

B
ecause
Tyler and I were doing coke every day and every night, and booze was just as excessive as the cocaine—we drank it all, beer, Scotch, vodka, whiskey, tequila, wine coolers, red wine, Goldschläger, gin and tonic, etc.—all of our porno money was spent as soon as we fucked for it. It was a blast to live in such a grand city and have the time and means to enjoy everything Dionysian within it. Los Angeles is the best place to live, period. Tyler and I frequented The Cat & Fiddle, Barfly, The Abbey, Improv, The Viper Room, Saddle Ranch, La Poubelle, and Birds. We went out dancing at Joya, 7969 Santa Monica, Hollywood Athletic Club, Three Clubs, and Fubar. We ate at Matsuhisa, Water Grill, The Pig, Cobras and Matadors, and French Market Place. We went anywhere we damn well pleased. Carousing was all that mattered, our skewed version of everyday, normal life. Our lives revolved around the next outing, the next party.

We remained living in the same cheap studio apartment. Even though we were making a few thousand per week in porn, we still only paid $575 a month for rent. Our neighborhood was full of transsexual prostitutes and drug dealers, so it was cool. Much better than the closed-minded and uninspiring suburb of Thousand Oaks. The filthy and unsafe elements suited us. It got unbearably hot in the summer without air conditioning. But we could be as loud as we wanted since it was so loud on the streets at night. There were fights, car crashes, police helicopters, and drunks. It was scary and fun at the same time.

Our place was cute. We painted the walls light blue with lavender borders. The bathroom was bright purple with a day-glow shower curtain. I painted little red roses in various spots on each wall. On the dark green fridge, I painted “I like food, food tastes good!” in honor of one of my favorite bands, the Descendents.

My little Sony boom box provided music when we smoked and drank all night. There was also a television and a PlayStation. Sometimes Tyler would challenge one of our friends to a coked-out marathon of Tony Hawk. I asked him to buy a DVD player after shooting a POV scene with some creepy producer. Tyler bought the video game player instead. I hate video games. There was a time when I got hooked on Nintendo, but I was seven years old. Now, it’s just Nofriendo.

We kept our cheap apartment relatively clean. You could catch me vacuuming at three in the morning. I refused to have a garbage bin in the place for fear of tempting the cockroaches that are just about everywhere in Los Angeles. Maybe it’s because the weather is so nice. Even on the cleanest streets in Beverly Hills, there are cockroaches. Roaches on our street were dark, fearless, mysterious. Diseased. I often had nightmares about them, and still do.

The best thing about the apartment was the twenty-four hour unlimited access to as much cocaine as we needed, thanks to Ernesto. Tyler and I were Ernesto’s best clients. We spent a thousand dollars a week on cocaine. He would even allow us to go in and get it when he wasn’t home. Tyler had a special method of breaking the screen off Ernesto’s kitchen window. All he had to do was slide it to the right and it would open just enough to crawl through. Tyler and I were such trusted friends that we knew where Ernesto hid the stash. It was always in a coffee mug right above the pantry. We would break off however much we needed and weigh it on the tiny drug scale. Usually a couple grams. The money was left on the counter. It was a beautiful system.

I never realized at the time how much of an addict I was. I had only tried coke a couple of times before Tyler found such a steady source in Ernesto. We would hang out in his apartment and before we were in porn he would give the coke to us for free. Soon it went from a weekend thing to a nightly activity. The word “addict” never applied to me though, or so I thought. I didn’t even consider myself a cigarette addict. I’d been smoking since I was fourteen, but I just thought it was because I liked it, not that I needed it. Tyler and I weren’t addicts, we said. We just liked to party. Drugs feed your mind such bullshit. It’s amazing.

Ever since Tyler had that first Viagra he became obsessed with the little blue pills. He insisted on getting his own prescription. He got it from a drug-dealer doctor that ran an urgent care clinic in Canoga Park. All the porno people went to him for pills. Without checking any vitals or stats, Dr. Dope prescribed my twenty-five year old cokehead boyfriend Viagra. We didn’t know very much about the drug, except that it was for old men. That, and if you mixed it with any nitrates you could die. Tyler wasn’t worried about harming himself since it was a porn director that gave him one in the first place. It had to be safe, right? As long as he didn’t do any poppers or sniff any VCR head cleaner, he’d be fine.

One night, Tyler and I were hanging out at home doing coke instead of eating dinner, the usual. Coke was our dinner. It was laundry night, so we got an extra gram to stay focused. We thought having after-coke coke was the same as having coffee after a meal, only stronger. Ernesto had drinks and did lines with us while we washed our clothes. By 2:30 in the morning, it was just Tyler and I with a huge pile of clean, unfolded clothes in the middle of the floor. We never folded. There weren’t enough drugs in the world to get us to fold. Out of nowhere, Tyler started pacing the apartment. He was totally jacked up and wanted to smoke inside. I wouldn’t let him. He grabbed his chest, took a deep breath and held it for a second. When he let it out loudly, he put his fingers around his left wrist to check his pulse. His eyes darted all around the apartment. His mind was racing and he didn’t hold long enough to properly count the beats. He didn’t need to. It was too fast to count.

“Tyler, what are you doing?” I asked, very sweetly. I was concerned,
but I didn’t want to sound alarmed. He was freaking me out.

“My heart’s just banging. I think there’s something wrong.” He barely made eye contact with me as he walked to the porch to have a cigarette.

“Maybe you shouldn’t smoke right now. Cigarettes are a stimulant. Have some water or go get in the shower. A cold shower will snap you out of this,” I optimistically suggested.

Tyler just took another loud, deep breath and felt his bare chest again. He had this look in his eyes that happens only when he’s done way too much coke. It’s a crazy, paranoid expression that shuts him off from anyone else. He goes into his own fucked-up world and acts like a complete asshole in the real one. Every time Tyler had gone psycho on me with jealousy and yelled at me, accusing me of being “against him,” he had this exact look about him. Telescopic fish-eyes.

“Are you okay? Is there something I can do for you?” I was scared now.

He looked at me with fear and hate. Like I was a bitch for asking him if he was okay. “No. Ori. I’m not ‘okay.’ Do I look ‘okay’ to you? My heart is going way too fast. I have chest pains. I took a Viagra a little while ago, and I feel bad, really bad.”

“What did you take a Viagra for? It’s so late.” I couldn’t hide how stupid I thought it was.

Tyler yelled at me, “Because I wanted to be crazy, Ori! I don’t know, maybe I wanted to fuck! Or do you only want to fuck on camera, for money? Is that it?”

“What? No, Tyler. That’s not true,” I said in a small voice. It always hurt my feelings when he said things like this. I wasn’t really sure what I liked more, sex at home or sex in the movies. Tyler always knew where to hit me when I was feeling vulnerable. Only hookers like it more in the pornos, I thought. If I like getting paid for sex more, it means I am just a prostitute. Being called a hooker is way worse than being a porn star.

“Ori. I feel really, really bad. Call 911!”

“No. I can’t. You’re all right. You’re just freaking out.”

“ORI! Call fucking 911! I’m having a fucking heart attack!” He screamed at me, his eyes bulging out in terror.

“No! You’re fine, Tyler. You’re just too hot. Look, I’ll get a cold washcloth to put on your neck. Just take some deep breaths and calm down!”

“Fuck it! I’ll call myself if you won’t do it. This is serious! I’m having a fucking heart attack and you don’t even fucking care!” He flopped down on the bed and picked up the phone with the free hand not clutching his chest. “I can’t believe you’re making me call my own ambulance, Ori. You won’t even do this for me. You don’t love me at all! I could die, Ori! You don’t fucking love me, do you?”

I loved him more than I loved anyone else in the world. I was fucked up, too, and scared that he was going to get us in deep trouble. You never call the police when you’re on drugs. They will arrest you. Didn’t he know that? Was his heart attack as real as our paranoia? “Tyler, please don’t call! Please! We’ll get in trouble. We are so fucked up!” I begged him not to call.

He dialed 911.

I ran downstairs and pounded on Ernesto’s door. The only person I had to help me was the dealer. He grabbed Tyler by the arm, “Look, man, you gotta listen to me. Don’t smoke right now. Don’t drink any alcohol. You need some water. I’ve seen this happen a lot of times. You’re not having a heart attack. You gotta chill out, man. You don’t need an ambulance, man. Relax.” Ernesto was a lot better at this than I was. He wasn’t screaming at Tyler or sobbing, calling him “baby.” But all of Ernesto’s pragmatic drug wisdom bounced off of Tyler’s fixed gaze. It was no use. His mind was set on heart attack.

The sirens came blaring down the street and an ambulance and fire engine stopped outside of the gate. Red and white lights flashed in the night sky. I held on to Tyler’s arm as we walked down the steps and out the gate, as if we were leaving one altar for another, ill-omened one. He was my man. I had to stand by him, no matter how stupid he was being.

“Who called?” The fireman boomed in a loud, clear voice. He was the first sober person we’d seen in ten hours.

“I did. It was me. But it was a mistake,” Tyler backed down. He did look a lot better. His crazy-eye disappeared. He was now standing in front of the emergency medical technicians, very humbled.

“You called about a heart attack?” the fireman asked. He knew the story. Young, fit men don’t have heart attacks unless it’s because of drugs.

“Yeah, I was feeling chest pain, but it’s starting to feel better. I think I’m okay now.” Tyler was calming, crashing, doing his best to look innocent.

“Have you been taking any drugs tonight?” fireman number two asked.

“We took some ecstasy that someone gave us at a party. I don’t know what was in them. We never do this. We thought we’d try it just once. It was stupid. We’re more mature than that. They’re wearing off now. I’m okay.”

Tyler seemed quite fine all of the sudden and talked us out of having to get in the ambulance. It was as if Ferris Bueller were the star of an ABC Afterschool Special. He pulled it off, but it had a sobering effect on both of us. Back in our apartment, we were again alone. All was calm, and we were safe. I began picking through the clothes pile, looking for some pajamas.

“Where’s the coke? What did you do with the rest that was on this plate?” Tyler asked.

I was shocked that he wanted to do more after everything that’d happened. “I’m sorry, Tyler, I got scared and flushed it in the toilet when you called 911. I didn’t know what to do. I thought we would get in trouble. I’m sorry,” I cried.

“You did what? You flushed it? How could you do that? Oh fuck, Ori! That was so much, and you just flushed it! I really could use some right now. I just need a few lines to go to sleep and unwind. You flushed it!” He just needed a few lines to go to sleep.

“I’m sorry Tyler,” I sobbed. I was exhausted. I couldn’t argue anymore.

“Will you go down and get some more from Ernesto? Please?” He was serious.

“No! It’s too late. You don’t need anymore! Let’s just get it tomorrow,” I pleaded.

“You’re the one who threw it all in the toilet without asking me! You should go get more. Don’t you love me?”

Of course I loved him. So, down, down, down to Ernesto’s I went.