Absolute Mayhem Page 6

  In my early days in LA, my agent, Roy, had put me up at his house, where a bunch of other girls he represented lived. The first porn star I met there was Noname Jane, who was really sweet. She had a husband and a boyfriend, and I thought she was way cool. We're still good friends to this day. Jane is very spiritual and we have a lot in common. But most of the girls were complete crack-heads, straight out of Jerry Springer.

  The girl I had to share a room with was a speed-smoking hooker. She was extremely stupid. She would walk Roy's two dogs in her stiletto heels at 2 am around Granada Hills, which is a genteel suburban area in the west San Fernando Valley, and she got her ID photo taken at the Department of Motor Vehicles wearing a stripper outfit, her head all cracked out. She was oft en offering guys blow jobs at the gym. She was just a filthy, messy pig who pretty much didn't sleep – a good thing, since I had to share a bed with her!

  Another girl not only did speed and Ecstasy but was also the biggest pot smoker I'd ever seen. Her room was so disgusting – you couldn't even walk in there without stepping on something, including left over food. Roy had to drive us to shoots and these girls were always one or two hours late. Naturally, Roy would blame all of us for this in front of the annoyed production managers at the shoots.

  I was always professional, ready and waiting to go on time, but Roy was oft en so stressed out that he failed to give us the full story for a shoot, and this usually meant that we were unprepared. We went out not having the right clothes or we discovered that we weren't getting paid what we thought. And, to make things worse, Roy would oft en yell at people and fight and argue with his clients. Most people hated dealing with him. I lost a lot of work because many companies didn't want to book any girls through him.

  The one ray of sunshine in my months living in Roy's house was meeting Belladonna, who was then calling herself just Bella. (She'd previously appeared in Hustler as 'Sandy' in 2000.) We got along instantly and started partying really hard. Roy wasn't getting us much work, so we had a lot of time on our hands. We would go out to clubs in Hollywood, get VIP treatment everywhere, go to after-parties – we totally ran amok.

  Bella is originally from Utah and actually grew up a Mormon. She is two years younger than me and had been doing porn for about six months to a year before I'd got started. She had quit and moved back to Utah, then changed her mind and moved back to Roy's just after I'd moved there. I thought she was a very nice girl, and she went on to have an outstanding porn career. In 2003, at age 22, she decided to move on from acting to directing, for a well-known company called Evil Angel. Even back then, she already had quite a reputation for extreme sex, and she is known for putting huge objects up her ass and doing really hard, nasty scenes that oft en involve several guys gang-banging the bejeezus out of her. Of late, she has become somewhat notorious for slamming the industry on mainstream TV shows such as 20/20 and has been quite vocal about the health risks for its performers, having contracted chlamydia and gonorrhoea a few times herself. In 2005, she became a mother, with a healthy baby girl, and the baby shower was actually filmed and shown on Family Business, the Showtime reality series about the porn business.

  But meantime, things began unravelling in the Roy Garcia house. One day, Roy came home from a trip and found we had stayed in and partied all night with the porn star Mark Davis. He lost it, as he'd specifically said that no parties and no guys were allowed in the house. I was trying to sleep and he kicked down the door, screaming at me. It was not a good scene, so Bella and I packed our bags and left . We stayed at the nearby Aku Aku Motel (21830 Ventura Boulevard, Woodland Hills, for those of you fans out there keen on tracing my chequered past).

  With Roy out of the picture, we started representing ourselves. Bella was having a hard time getting work – somewhat hard to believe, given what an amazing performer she is, as everyone in porn now knows – so I was pumping her up to every director I was working for. Everyone was booking me for lead roles in features but no one liked Bella at the time because of her tattoos. I convinced a lot of people to hire her and we eventually moved in together to an apartment in Woodland Hills, got ourselves sober and started working hard.

  A lot more work started coming in, which was great, even though I was oft en working up to 16 hours a day, five days a week. I scored an amazing role in a film for VCA Pictures called The New Girl. VCA told me that they hadn't used me before because they didn't want to deal with Roy as my agent. This film was directed by the great F. J. 'Freddie' Lincoln, who'd spent eight years directing for VCA until Larry Flynt took it over, and it was my first-ever lead role in a major feature film.

  I loved this movie because it was set in the fourteenth century. I love period pieces, and in this one the costumes and settings were awesome. The storyline had my character drink a potion that put me to sleep for 400 years, and then I awoke in the basement of an internet voyeur-cam house, with porn stars all over the place. The best scene was when I snapped out of the fourteenth-century character and did two guys, Eric Price and Chris Cannon, and the hottest part of that threesome was when I was bouncing up and down in reverse-cowgirl position and giving a hot blow job at the same time.

  It was about that time that I started dating a guy from Orange County, California, called Craven Moorehead (his stage name, obviously). The director Stoney Curtis had invited Bella and me to a club, and Craven was there because he was Stoney's production assistant at the time. We hit it off instantly. He was very sweet, though it wasn't until he invited me to a barbecue at Stoney's house in West Hills that I fell for him. We were alone, waiting for everyone else to show up, and he started playing my favourite song, Metallica's 'Fade to Black' from their Ride the Lightning album. I mean, he was playing it perfectly on guitar, because it was his favourite song too.

  And then, by sheer chance, Metallica's Garage Days Re-Revisited EP came on the radio! That did it. The song 'Last Caress/Green Hell', written by Glenn Danzig, just slays me, and the whole thing ends with those Iron Maiden riff s (actually, it's Metallica's parody of Iron Maiden's 'Run to the Hills'). Iron Maiden was another of my favourite bands when I was growing up. Juvenile-delinquent headbanger heaven. Craven and I just connected immediately!

  Bella, however, didn't like Craven and me being together at all; she knew what a player he was. Everyone in the industry knew about him, because he was always hitting on girls. Bella had seen him out with other girls when we were dating, too, so his reputation as a horndog was always out there for all to see. I guess I knew, intuitively, that Bella was right, but I truly hoped he could change.

  While personally things were tricky, my career was going from strength to strength, and I was getting more great roles. In 2002, I starred in Perfect, directed by Michael Ninn for Private Media Group, which was described as a 'Matrix-style hardcore blockbuster packed with high-tech special effects' in Private's 2002 mail-order catalogue.

  I played a robot, since it was a very futuristic movie, and I had some crazy hair and make-up done by one of my favourite make-up artists, Lee Garland. I wore a very sexy white, full-body leotard and did some robot-like dialogue in a dream-like state with smoke all around, and then did a scene with Dale DaBone on a steel table. We had some crazy sex against a green screen while suspended in the air with harnesses. It was supposed to look like The Matrix, as I'm leaning back in mid-air, getting fucked. (It was a lot of fun on the harness and I would have loved to have done all kinds of tricks!)

  At the end of the shoot, it was very stressful for the crew and for Dale because Michael had this crazy idea about how to shoot the pop shot – he lined up 20 cameras in a circle around us and they were all supposed to go off simultaneously and continuously while Dale was cumming. It was supposed to look like slow motion all around, and it resulted in one of the longest sex scenes I've ever shot. I'm not sure if it came out the way that Michael had it planned but it was certainly a very unique way of ending a sex scene. What a climax!

  Somehow, during this hectic period of my life, Craven and I fou
nd ourselves driving to Las Vegas to get married. Bella and Craven's best friend, Dez, were in the car with us, and they were going to be our bridesmaid and best man. Craven was at the wheel and I was sitting behind – we'd had a big fight just before we left , and he'd refused to let me, his future bride, sit next to him in the car en route to our wedding! (Hmm. Was that an omen or what?)

  Let me say now, with the wisdom of hindsight, that I think getting married on a whim is a bit insane, to say the least. (I don't recall being on drugs at that point, but I did start up again after I got married.) As strange as it may sound, we had made the decision a whole two weeks before heading out to Vegas. I remember thinking to myself, 'Is this really a good idea?' But then I decided to do it anyway, thinking what harm could it do. (I could always get a divorce if things didn't work out, right?) So we got married at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel, which I had pre-booked. I rented a beautiful dress, and Craven rented a tuxedo. And Bella looked ravishing as my bridesmaid, as she always did.

  When we got back to LA after the wedding, I was still living with Bella, as Craven and I hadn't yet found a place together. But Bella then let another porn star move in with us and that completely fucked up my whole friendship with her. This girl (who will remain nameless) was obsessed with Bella and she was jealous of me and my career. She would monopolise Bella's time, and they excluded me to do their own thing together, oft en walking out and slamming the door without even saying goodbye. In the end, I couldn't stand it any more, and it was a great relief when I moved in with Craven. Bella and I never made up after that whole incident, which is a real shame because she was such a good friend.

  And so began my period of domestic bliss with Craven. Ha! To cut a woefully long story mercifully short, my marriage was a two-and-a-half year disaster. It led to me nearly ruining my career during what was to have been my peak time, shortly after I got my boobs enlarged in 2002. And I would much rather talk about my boobs than talk about my ex-husband, so I hope you will bear with me here.

  Ever since I'd stopped growing at 16, I had wanted bigger breasts. So in LA, as soon as I finally had plenty of money to spend, I asked around and talked to a few girls in the business who had nice boobs. Among the famous porn stars, Jill Kelly had my favourite set of boobs, so I decided to go to her surgeon, Dr Fischer (who is now on the TV show Extreme Makeover). I was able to afford being out of work for a couple of months, so I stayed completely sober for the first month, got my boobs done and continued staying sober during the month-long recovery period. (Then I made up for lost time and partied hard on New Year's Eve!)

  Looking back, I can say it was the scariest, most painful experience I've ever had. It was scary being put under anaesthesia, and it was painful from the minute I woke up. All I remember is coming out of surgery, hearing the nurses but not being able to see them yet, and then figuring out that what they were saying was, 'Stop kicking, you'll cause bleeding!' I was kicking around, trying to wake up. Then I opened my eyes and said, 'Is it done yet?' Apparently, I didn't notice the huge mountain on my chest, not until the pain kicked in and I had to have more morphine, which knocked me out again. The swelling takes a long time to go down, and then your boobs don't really drop for about a year – that's when they start looking more natural. And, as the years go by, your boobs tend to look smaller than they first appeared, but I'm very proud of them now. That was my one and only boob job.

  My bigger chest immediately made me feel way more confident with myself, and I really had a great time going shopping for a change. It felt so awesome to walk into Victoria's Secret knowing I was able to buy a D-cup bra! And I could pretty much wear any kind of top, whereas when I had small boobs I had the worst time trying to find tops that made me feel sexy. Now I felt like more of a woman.

  Armed with my new self-confidence, I started feature-dancing that year, and I eventually got more gigs than I could handle. I made a ton of money. Feature-dancing is when a stripper gets paid per show to be the headline act at a gentlemen's club. Usually, this girl is a porn star, and her name and celebrity will draw more customers to the club. A feature dancer will always put on a much more elaborate show than a regular dancer – with big, expensive costumes, props, games, merchandise and other stuff . I was dancing my ass off in the strip clubs across the country.

  In all fairness, Craven can't take full responsibility for the problems in my movie career. It's true that I worked condom-only after we were married, and I lost a lot of work because of it – people don't want to shoot condoms. We did have some kind of co-dependence thing going on, though, which was sometimes indirectly detrimental to me. There were a couple of times, for instance, when Craven didn't like who I was working with – meaning, he didn't like me fucking certain guys – so I acquiesced and didn't do those shoots. He once insisted that I come out to some stupid car show with him, so I had to cancel work. Then, there was our constant fighting, which sometimes led me to cancel shoots too.

  When I was going through all of this emotional turbulence, I would sometimes turn to cocaine to numb the pain. I wanted to kick the habit, though, and I went through a stage when I would have it in my possession for months at a time and not even touch it. I thought I had it under control, but I was just about to enter another period of partying.

  Marriage, clearly, wasn't quite the panacea I had hoped for. Eventually, in December 2003, we split up and Craven moved out. It wasn't all doom and gloom, because it had been on the cards for ages, and a room in my house that I'd been renting out became vacant not too long after, and Jay Allan, my good friend and favourite photographer, moved in. Let the good times roll! Boy, we had some great house parties.

  Chapter Five

  CALIFORNICATION

  People have asked me what I think, in retrospect, is the most important lesson I learned about making the transition from modelling to movies. Sometimes, I'm not sure how to answer that. The thing is, I do love modelling and I wish I could have done more mainstream magazine layouts, such as Maxim or FHM.

  Actually, if I hadn't done hardcore, I could have tried out for Playboy magazine, which would have probably launched a whole different career for me. Perhaps it would have led me to mainstream acting and modelling, which is what I really wanted. But Playboy likes to deploy its famous 'girl next door' branding, and usually doesn't use us 'girls gone bad' hardcore models. This helps to distinguish it from its main competitor, Penthouse, which uses adult film stars a great deal in pictorials and centrefolds (and which I've appeared in loads). The one time Playboy made a notable exception was in its March 2002 issue, when they did a cover story and pictorial on 'The Women of Porn' and they had three Vivid Video contract girls (Tera Patrick, Kira Kener and Dasha) on the cover. Things could have been different, I guess, but being a Pisces I'm oft en too hasty with my decisions, and that's always been my biggest problem. In so many ways, I am my own worst enemy.

  That's not to say that I'm not grateful for how quickly I was able to make an impact on the porn industry. This might have been because I was one of the few Australian girls shooting porn in the US, a market where very few non-American girls were being employed. There were the Aussies Jodie Moore and Bobbi Barrington, too, but they were only just coming into the industry around the same time as me.

  The path I took was to base myself in Southern California and work my ass off , whereas Jodie wanted to be the number-one Aussie porn star so bad that she ran for a seat in the Queensland parliament in 2001 and the Australian senate in 2004 – which, if you ask me, is an easy way to get famous. She can't have realistically believed that she'd be voted in. From what I'vet witnessed, when girls in our industry do these kinds of things, it's seen by most people as a publicity stunt. As a result, people lose respect for girls like us. But Jodie was clearly of another school of thought – any publicity is good publicity, right? And as for Bobbi Barrington, she made a small splash doing 'gonzo' porn and did well for a while, although she seems to have vanished from the scene almost as quickly as she came in. I
have no idea where she is today.

  Gonzo, by the way, is a sub-genre of hardcore porn that's half-improvised theatre, half-reality TV, whereby performers work without a script and have to make stuff up as they go along, including the sex, which oft en doesn't have a director calling fixed positions. Usually, it is shot cheaply with a very small crew, oft en a single cameraman with a hand-held camera. The resulting 'amateur' effect is part of its appeal, as is the 'shock value' of performers having spontaneous sex with real people suddenly roped into scenes. The creation of gonzo porn is oft en credited to the famous director John Stagliano.

  Bobbi did a scene in a 2001 VCA Pictures production in which I had the leading role, Portrait of a Woman. Bobbi's appeal was obvious, since she was a big-breasted blonde who totally fit the preferred porn-star stereotype. We once did a photo shoot together for the photographer Suze Randall, in which I dominated her. I was dressed up as a 1940s Mafi a chick. It was a smokin' hot layout, but I'm not sure where it ended up. I would have loved to have seen that magazine. We don't always know where our shoots end up, unless we want to spend time at news-stands looking at porno magazines, hoping to see ourselves on the cover! I don't do that, of course, and usually find out which magazines I'm in through my fans telling me.

  As I've said, posing for magazines was one of my favourite things to do at first. I particularly loved posing for Suze Randall, for whom I probably did at least 20 layouts. Suze is hysterical. She's British, a great photographer and was originally a Playboy model. She was always really loud during photo shoots. She would say funny things like, 'Spread your legs, you lazy sheila!' or, 'Point your toes, bitch!' It was (and still is) rare to have a female photographer shoot you in this business. The other female photographer whom I really liked is Robbye Bentley. She is a really crazy character too. Robbye did a lot of my early shoots in 2000 and 2001 (before moving into directing porn films, as you've seen at the start of this book). I loved posing for her.