Absolute Mayhem Read online

  The other area I excelled in was sports. My primary school was very sports-orientated, and I played tee-ball, soft ball and tennis. I was into little athletics and won a lot of competitions in the 100-metre sprints, hurdles and long jump. Amazingly, my mother would fork out for the after-school sports events. I also swam, though it was very hard to race in swimming because of my chronic asthma. I'd nearly died from an attack when I was three. I kept having major attacks after that, up to the age of around 12, where I would have to miss days at school and be put on a nebuliser (an oxygen machine). My mother would take care of me in this regard, too, as she would set up the machine and get me to the doctor that we always saw. I think she was actually worried that I could die every time I got a really bad asthma attack.

  In short, my early life was defined mostly by my immersion in music and sports, which remain my strongest interests in life to this day (aside from sex, of course!).

  After leaving primary school and progressing to high school, my life was marked less by music and sports and more by my actual involvement with a real gang. (Yes, drum roll, applause!) Whereas the little gangs at primary school were meaningless – never lasting long or amounting to anything more than a bunch of kids to run amok with – this gang was more organised. It had an identity and a name, which was known to the authorities.

  I became more rebellious than ever, and I was smoking and drinking at the age of 12. By 13, I was ditching school a lot and spending my time hanging out at the creek or in the bush with my friends, smoking weed from home-made bongs, each one exquisitely craft ed from a small orange-juice bottle with a piece of someone's hose and some tin for a cone. I wore an under-cut hairstyle and I used to sew my school-uniform skirts into tight miniskirts because I hated the long, ugly pleats.

  I became the sort of kid that most social workers would probably classify a juvenile delinquent. The Juvenile Aid Bureau in Queensland is where troubled teens are sent for mandatory counselling, and I ended up in there a few times during my first high-school years, mostly for doing drugs.

  In class, I was always arguing with teachers about why I needed to learn certain things and I felt like they could never give me a proper answer. I always believed I had a right to ask such questions. All that crap we were taught in school has proved absolutely useless when applied to my life. I made the maths teacher so mad that as punishment I was oft en sent to do my maths in the deputy-principal's office. The deputy-principal reminded me of my mother, in that she was always putting people down, and I think she singled me out for especially mean treatment, having obviously seen the rebellious side of me. Needless to say, we fought a lot.

  Interestingly, at high school I excelled in all the artistic and creative stuff – art, drama, English, music, home economics, metalwork and woodwork. I had pretty much already given up sports: I was way too busy getting stoned, smoking cigs and drinking like a fish.

  There were lots of girls at the school who liked to say they were going to become actresses and models, and I was one of them. Most of these girls thought they were too hot to trot, though. They would put me down and say mean things to my face, teasing me about my big eyes. I tried to ignore them, but it made me feel like an outcast, even inside my own peer group. There was always this sheen of negative energy around me. I have a photo of me taken when I was 12, wearing a black Motley Crüe T-shirt and a very short black skirt that showed off my long, bare legs – the kind of legs they call 'legs for days'. My mother wrote on the back of that photo, 'Guess who? Still wants to be a model!' It was good to know that my own mother rated my chances as highly as my so-called friends. As it turned out, I'm the only one I know of who achieved their dream – even if it was slightly in the extreme!

  Maybe surprisingly for someone who later became a porn star, I wasn't a hit with the boys at school. I think this was probably because they didn't like the fact that I was too tough for most of them. Those were my gang years. Most of the girls I knew had older siblings who were in gangs, and I got in through knowing them. We would crash parties and get into fights, oft en running from the cops and finding ourselves wanted for vandalism. We'd get wasted a lot and go to nightclubs, able to get in because Brisbane bouncers oft en didn't ask for ID and I looked much older than I was.

  As I grew up, my mother's drinking became more and more a major source of embarrassment for me, and she would oft en humiliate me in front of my friends. She would show up at our hangouts and start yelling at all of them, telling them to leave me alone. She would call their parents when she was drunk, crying and talking nonsense, and even called the parents of my enemies, which made it intolerable for me at school. I lost a lot of friends because of all that.

  One night when I was 14, my mum allowed me to attend a party. She said it would be fine as long as I came home by 11 pm, so off I went. My drug-taking had moved on to speed, acid and magic mushrooms by this stage, but that night I didn't do any, as I knew I'd have to face my mother. Maybe I drank a little, at most.

  I was waiting outside for a ride back at exactly 11 pm when a police car pulled up, and one of the cops asked for me by name. I was initially fearful and didn't want to let him know who I was, until he said, 'We're looking for her because her mother's been in an accident.' So I went, 'Oh, shit. Yeah, that's me!' And I jumped into the police car and they drove me home.

  Apparently, my mother had decided to go out at 9 pm to look for me. But she was already quite drunk – she was six times over the legal limit, they said – and had ended up wrapping her car around a pole. I found her sitting out front with a bleeding nose and clutching a glass of wine!

  'Where were you?' she yelled when she saw me.

  To which I replied, 'You fucking drunk bitch. You said I could go if I was home by eleven!'

  She said she didn't remember telling me that. Clearly, she'd blacked out again, like she tended to do pretty much every night.

  I turned to the cops. 'You're just going to leave me here like this?' I said to them, in exasperation. 'Look at her! What the fuck is wrong with you people?'

  To my amazement, the cops said, 'You know, we can arrest you for swearing.'

  I was incredulous. This couldn't be happening. 'This is fucked up!' I yelled, and I went inside and locked myself in my room.

  And as for my mother, all that happened was they suspended her driver's licence for two years.

  From around the age of ten, I was always trying to stay with my friends' families or get myself into foster care but the people at the child-services places didn't really help at all, probably because I didn't have actual proof of child abuse. It was mainly psychological with my mum. It got physical as well, but it didn't usually leave much of a mark. She would dig her long nails into my arm and slap me and fling me around. The slaps had turned to punches as I'd got older, and she would call me lots of names – 'little slut' was one of them, thereby preparing me for my future career (gee, thanks, Mum!).

  Once, she tried to take us along to family counselling, in order to sort out our family problems. This was really weird since she seemed to me to be the one most in need of counselling. It was her way of blaming everything on us kids, blaming us for making her life miserable. She also did her utmost to keep us away from our father, by throwing away all the letters he wrote to us and spending all his child-support money on herself, on her wine and her cigs and fancy gourmet foods for the fridge. One time, I found out that she had spent a large cheque from my father on going shopping for herself after she bragged about it to my best friend's mother and this woman had then told me. I really think she didn't want us around and was resentful of the fact that she was stuck with us.

  It all finally came to a head one night in the school holidays when I was 14. I was fast asleep in my bed when she stormed into my bedroom in the middle of the night. She actually stopped to take off her glasses before she started punching me in the face. She was shouting at me, accusing me of doing heroin (which was't true at all; I've never ever done heroin), and that's when I dec
ided I'd had enough. It was time for me to fight back.

  She clearly hadn't remembered that I'd started taking kick-boxing lessons in my friend's garage. As she perched above me in my bed, trying to keep punching me, I kicked her clear across the room.

  'That's it!' she screamed. 'I want you out of here!'

  I ran blindly out of the house, into the middle of nowhere. I'd taken no possessions with me, and I had no money, no bank account and no job. After racing thirty minutes through the bush, I finally reached a friend's house, where I spent the night, and after that I roamed from place to place. I remember sleeping under a bus stop a couple of times after getting lost, probably after doing some acid or when I was too drunk or too stoned to know where the hell I was.

  A couple of days after she'd thrown me out, my mother had put up a 'MISSING CHILD' notice at the local McDonald's, where my gang usually hung out. That was so embarrassing! I know she did that not because she really wanted me back but because she didn't want people to think of her as a bad mother. In the meantime, there I was, moving all around the area – I stayed with a friend's family for a couple of months but I just wasn't accustomed to living in a normal, respectful household and they ended up kicking me out. I then moved in with one of my gang members, since I never formally left the gang, and slept on the floor for a couple of weeks.

  At this juncture, sex began to play its key role in my young life. I was definitely, by nature, promiscuous. I'd always wanted to kiss the boys in primary school, and I'd started flashing my small boobs to them when I was six. By the age of 11, I'd wanted to lose my virginity, but for some reason the boys didn't notice me until I turned 14. That was the age when I had sex for the first time, with some kid from school.

  He was 16, and I didn't really like him, but we got wasted at a party and spontaneously agreed to have sex on the way home – jumping each other's bones in someone's front yard. After a while, I sort of came to my senses and realised what was going on and told him to stop. He got it over and done with very quickly, and then he went round the school the next Monday bragging about it. Such a typical macho guy thing. He told everyone that I was a good fuck!

  Some girls might have cringed or cried, but my reaction to that was, 'Well, at least he didn't say I was bad, right?' It's funny to me that it never occurred to him to wonder whether he was any good, but I guess that's like most boys of his age – sex is a one-way street and you're only interested in the bragging rights. And the way I reacted to it is pretty revealing. Even at that age, I already had this instinctive way of accepting myself as a sex object, since I didn't mind being called a 'good fuck' at all – in fact, I was rather proud of it.

  What bearing might that have had on the fact that I finally became a porn star? Hmm, let's see now. Well, I had sex with some guy I didn't really know or even particularly like and became this romanticised sex object to him. Pardon my frankness, but isn't that what I went on to be for eight years and counting? That first time probably set the trend for my future. (That and my alcoholic mother's wonderful influence, of course.)

  It turned out that being kicked out of home finally got me expelled from school. After the holidays, I tried to enrol myself in year ten but they wouldn't let me. The deputy-principal told me, 'You're not welcome here. You have no legal guardian, so you can't come back to school.'

  'That's fine by me, bitch,' I said to her. 'I don't want to be here anyway. Fuck you!'

  I've since been told that her reason for expelling me was bullshit, but that wouldn't have bothered me even if I'd known. I walked out of there with the biggest smile on my face. I hated that school so much. It was nothing but hell for me every single day, which was why I oft en ditched classes for weeks at a time. Leaving at the end of year nine meant I'd only had two years of high school, because we start at year eight in Queensland.

  I slept with quite a few guys between then and the age of 16 – at least five that I can remember. They were all older than me and I never really had a relationship with any of them. I was just being promiscuous – because I craved attention, I think. Having sex was my way of feeling desired and loved. That and the fact that I enjoyed it so much!

  I was seeing a 22-year-old guy at one point, when I was 14 or 15. He worked in a boiler room, as a welder, and he had an accident at work. When he was in the hospital, I went to visit him with a bunch of friends. He asked everyone to leave except me, and I ended up giving him a blow job under the sheets! He was pretty high on morphine at that point, so I don't know how he even got it up. However, it was cut short when we were busted – when everyone walked back in and joked, 'What's goin' on in here?'

  About three months after leaving home, I found a more or less permanent place to stay. I met an older girl at a party and she allowed me to share her fl at with her. She was 22 and already had two kids, who were a real nightmare to deal with, but we got along quite well at first. I think she thought I was 17 and a bit more mature than some of the other girls I was hanging round with.

  But nature took its course after a year or so. My fl atmate found out that I was fucking her ex-boyfriend, whom she considered the love of her life. The situation was untenable, since I was in love with him too and had been seeing him for most of that year, behind her back. She actually saw us together while we were having sex. She shouted at me 'That's it!' and walked away. Afterwards, she had a friend come into my room and start beating me when I was sleeping, just like my mother did. And once again, with feeling, I was outta there. Again, in the middle of the night. Again, into the middle of nowhere. Déjà vu!

  It might surprise some people to learn that when I was a teenage runaway I never fucked guys for shelter. I know of porn stars who did, just so they could get food to eat and a roof over their heads, back when they were homeless like me. What I did instead was work and make my own money to survive.

  I started off as a 'tea and tidy' girl at a hair salon, and then I worked as a cashier at a Big Rooster restaurant (which then became a Red Rooster, when they were all bought up and had their names changed). One of the older girls I used to hang out with did 'promotions' for a living, strutting her stuff in the nightclubs and pubs, clad usually in lingerie or a bikini, and she told me how great the money was. She referred me to the owners of the company, who interviewed me and explained how it worked. I was offered a job and immediately took it.

  It turned out that the job entailed going to different pubs, clubs and bars around Brisbane, wherever I was booked, and pretty much doing whatever the managers asked: wearing lingerie and walking around selling raffle tickets, or wearing a bikini and washing the car windows of their customers. I was't promoting anything, really, just selling raffle tickets so people could win prizes, such as free booze or free dinners.

  I was a little uncomfortable about doing this for three main reasons. Firstly, even though I got away with it, I was so young and had to always pretend to be 18. Secondly, all these drunk (and much older) men would try to hit on me. And thirdly, I felt very vulnerable wearing only lingerie, with no security guys anywhere in sight.

  The job didn't last long. I had to catch so many buses just to get to where I had to be every time, and I'd usually turn up late. One day, I was very late and had to put on this complicated corset by myself, which took forever. The guy just fired me on the job, without paying me, after I had already worked one hour for him, so I never went back to it.

  In the short time that I'd been a promotions model, though, I found I'd got used to parading myself in various states of undress and become comfortable with showing my body. In fact, I'd started to like being looked at, even though the stares came from men who just wanted to ogle me and fantasise about what I might look like totally naked. That's why I see that job today as an important step in my career. I seriously don't think I could've made it later as a stripper in London, much less a porn star in Los Angeles, if I hadn't first done promotions.

  It was also my first experience of my personal survival being inextricably tied to monetary gai
n. If being seen half-naked was what it took to grant me my financial independence, then so be it. What we all ultimately want is to accrue enough 'fuck you money' – to be rich enough to say 'fuck you' to projects and people we're not interested in. And for me, at that age, with no school qualifications, promotions modelling seemed like a very good way to go. When you've come from nothing, there's nowhere to go but up.

  After so long in the adult-film business, I have learned that this is a very common theme in the lives of many of us porn stars. It can be a fantastic confidence booster if you're a young girl still learning to express yourself through your body, needing to regain your self-esteem after years of parental abuse.

  I think I will always have insecurities that have arisen from the ways in which I felt abandoned and neglected, mostly by my own family and so-called friends during my formative years in Queensland, and for that reason alone I'm certain I will never, ever move back to Brisbane. It's a city that reminds me of a past I'd rather forget. But because of my last few years living in my home town, these days when someone whips out a camera and tells me to take my clothes off it's the easiest thing to do in the whole wide world. I always went out clubbing half-naked anyway. Kerry Cohen, in her lovely memoir Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, wrote about how a boy once told her it was tough for guys because they have to work so hard to get laid, whereas all she needed to do was walk around bra-less. I know that feeling, because that's exactly what I did. The power a near-naked woman can have over a man, I know it well. And I find it so intoxicating!

  When I was just turning 15, however, I decided to take a 'real job' – doing legal conveyancing for the property market in Brisbane. I think they hired me for my enthusiasm in the interview and because I was willing to learn on the job. The office was a mess when I started working there, so I got stuck into reorganising everything. The company was called Fox Conveyancing and I worked there for a year. It was so small that they even had me as a manager at one point. We were responsible for all the necessary legal searches before a person or a company purchases a house or a plot of land – you know, all that small stuff like the title deeds and issues pertaining to bankruptcy and water and transportation (such as ensuring that they're not going to build a freeway over your house!). That job was crucial because it helped me get used to a more regimented way of working, preparing me for the world of financial markets.