How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

by Jameson, Jenna

  6. Physical Appearance: The Talent agrees that she will, during the entire Term of this Agreement, take diligent care of her health, weight, and appearance. The Company may declare a Default under this Agreement at any time after the Talent fails to maintain her appearance, as determined by the Company in its sole discretion.

  7. Law and Morality: The Talent agrees to comply at all times with all laws, rules, and regulations and shall refrain from drug or alcohol abuse and prostitution (including legal prostitution). The Talent agrees to conduct herself with the appropriate recognition of the fact that the success and best interests of the Company depend largely on the audience approval and interest in the Talent as a performer. The Talent therefore agrees to conduct herself at all times with due regard to social conventions and public morals and decency, as the same may apply to an adult entertainment performer. The Talent shall not commit any act or become involved in any situation or occurrence that would be detrimental to the best interests of the Company; or that would bring it into public disrepute, contempt, scandal or ridicule; or that shocks, insults, or offends the community; or that may reflect unfavorably upon the Company, whether or not such information becomes public. The Talent agrees that the Company may, at its sole discretion, suspend Residuals upon the Company’s finding that the Talent has engaged in acts or conduct detrimental to the Company.

  8. The Company shall have the right to cancel this agreement at any time if any portion of this agreement and terms are not met.

  In witness whereof, the parties hereto have duly agreed to this agreement:

  * * *

  [Production company]

  * * *

  [Porn star]

  SCHEDULE “A”

  Additional Compensation:

  Same Sex Anal Intercourse (excluding DP and Air Tight): $125.00 per scene

  Opposite Sex Anal Intercourse (excluding DP and Air Tight): $250.00 per scene

  Opposite Sex Double Penetration (excluding Air Tight): $400.00 per scene

  Air Tight (three males with three simultaneous penetrations): $650.00 per scene

  Multiple Partners: $250.00 per partner over three

  While filming my first movies for Wicked, I went out of my way not to make any friends. For the first time, I could feel myself getting bitter. I was upset at Nikki and Michael for dumping me, and realized that if I wanted anything done in this world, I would have to do it for myself. Ultimately, no one else cared; they all had their own agendas and ideas of who they wanted me to be.

  In my mind, every girl was jealous and every guy just wanted to sleep with me. One of the worst was Rodney Hopkins. He was on the crew of a Wicked movie, and he told me he was a photographer and wanted to shoot me in a boy-girl spread for Oui magazine. I told him I’d do it only with Lyle Danger and we agreed to meet for the shoot on Thursday at noon.

  That morning, I checked my calendar and I had double-booked myself. I was shooting a layout with Suze. So I called Rod, lied and told him I had to do some promotion for Wicked, and then rescheduled for 6 P.M. And, even more deviously, I said that to compensate, I’d come in full makeup (so that way I wouldn’t have to explain why I’d arrived already made up for a photo shoot).

  I jetted over from Suze’s studio to meet Rod, who had created a cute set in a diner with ice-cream sundaes on the counter. However, it was the most irritating shoot of my life. When I spread for him, he joked about there being an echo in the room. When I went into doggie position, he commented on needing a fish-eye lens for my ass. All evening, he kept making comments that one shouldn’t make around a woman, especially if one wants her to feel sexy. So I whipped through the positions as fast as possible to get it over with. I was so experienced by then that we were done in two hours, which impressed Rod.

  Rod called almost every evening after that. I had never given him my phone number, but he must have gotten it from the model release. I hadn’t given him any encouragement either, so who knows what he was thinking. It didn’t matter anyway; every time he asked me out, I told him I was busy.

  The fact is, even if I had liked Rod, I would have told him that I wasn’t available. I had no interest in getting caught up in anyone else’s bullshit or jealousy. A new relationship, in my mind, was just a stepping stone to a new betrayal. So every day after work, I went home alone and watched TV. I even stopped returning Lyle’s calls. And the lonelier I became, the angrier I got at the world. I was trying to build a chip on my shoulder big enough to block out the rest of the world and protect me from ever getting hurt again.

  One night, the phone rang. It was my brother’s wife, Selena. She had good news and bad news. The good news was that she was pregnant. She put Tony on the phone. He was still clean. “I’m a changed man,” he said. He was taking his pending fatherhood seriously, and had gotten a job as a dry-waller in Reading. The bad news was that my grandmother on my father’s side had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and had to have a double mastectomy.

  Even though my social life and material circumstances remained practically unchanged, my star began to rise in the adult world, starting with a two-page spread in Adult Video News (AVN), the industry’s biggest insider publication. Afterward, AVN decided to produce its first feature ever, in collaboration with VCA, one of the biggest adult-film production companies of the moment. They asked me to be their star and, just like an old Hollywood studio, Wicked loaned me out to them with the expectation that they would eventually receive a favor in return.

  A week into shooting, I did a scene with Kylie Ireland, Felicia, and Vince Voyeur. That night, when I returned from work, I had a sore throat. I didn’t worry about it, because I had always been somewhat sickly as a child. But by the end of the movie, my throat was so swollen it hurt to swallow and I was so weak I could barely hold a conversation. When I returned home, I looked in the mirror and there were huge white lumps all over my throat. I had no idea what was going on with my body and, even worse, I realized I didn’t know where anything was in L.A.: a hospital, a pharmacy, a hardware store, a friendly face. I’d never been this sick and had to deal with it alone before.

  I knocked on the door of my neighbors, an older couple who I had never even exchanged a “hello” with, and asked them where I could go to get looked at. It was 9 P.M., so they sent me to a nearby clinic. I waited for two hours in a musty room full of screaming children. The doctor who finally saw me was a hack. He had me open my mouth, peered inside, and said, “Okay, you have strep throat.”

  I told the doctor I was allergic to most antibiotics, so he recommended a new drug called Biaxin. I filled the prescription at a nearby pharmacy, went home, mixed it with water, shook it up, and forced the vile liquid through my closed throat. After about ten minutes, I began to feel loopy and light-headed. I knew exactly what was happening: that asshole had given me an antibiotic I was allergic to.

  I lay in my bed, and tried to go to sleep. I still have a belief that everything is going to be better in the morning. However, as soon as my head hit the pillow, my arms, legs, and fingers began to swell and break out in hives.

  I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I was so big I looked like an extra in Shallow Hal, but with chicken pox. My mouth was completely discolored, as if I had sloppily applied cheap pink lipstick; my tongue was so swollen I couldn’t even close my mouth without biting it; and my skin was peeling as if sunburned. Then an itchy red rash grew around my nose and mouth.

  My body was disintegrating before my eyes. I sat down to go to the bathroom, and it burned like an open wound being doused with salt water. I began to panic: maybe I was misdiagnosed, maybe I had caught something far worse on set. When I went to the bathroom again half an hour later, it hurt so badly I screamed aloud. I had to hold it and push it out in spurts because the pain was so intense. When I wiped, skin came off in flakes and then sheets. The color drained from my face; my heart started beating quickly; my body went ice cold. I had no idea what the fuck was happening. I stood up from the toilet, yelled some uninte
lligible word that sounded like “Fuck!” and, mid-scream, passed out cold, smashing my head on the toilet seat on the way down. I don’t know if it was the impact, the shock, or the sickness that knocked me out.

  When I awoke (it was still daylight so not too much time had passed), I was delirious. Somehow, even though I was unaware that I was sweating, shaking, and bleeding from the head, I knew that I needed help. I crawled to my living room and swiped my arm across a box that doubled as my coffee table. Receipts, change, and business cards came tumbling to the floor. I desperately tore through them, looking for the name of someone who seemed friendly, someone who could help me. It never even occurred to me to call 911.

  Finally, on the back of a receipt for Fritos, I saw Rod’s number. It must have been a sign. If he wanted to go out with me so badly, here was his chance. I called him and he was at my door in five minutes.

  When he saw me, he shit a brick. I was pale, perspiring, convulsing, disfigured by rashes and hives, and choking on my own tongue. He drove me to the emergency room of the North Hollywood Medical Center. As soon as they saw me, they put me on a gurney rushed me into a room, hooked me up to IVs, and paged a doctor.

  The doctor walked into the room and slammed a six-inch needle into my thigh. As the cortisone rushed through my bloodstream, my body steadied, my temperature dropped, and my life force returned. Just feeling like myself again was the greatest high I have ever experienced.

  “Your airway was fifteen minutes away from being completely closed,” the doctor informed me. “If you hadn’t come in, you would have suffocated to death. We almost had to intubate you.”

  It had all been an allergic reaction, but such a traumatic one that I couldn’t work for another six weeks. I called the other girls from the movie and told them that someone on set had given me strep throat. And it turned out that Kylie knew exactly who that person was: herself. So I lay on my couch recuperating, watching crap TV day after day and eating fifteen-cent packages of ramen noodles because I had no money coming in. (I still eat ramen to this day—though sometimes I add a little rice; some pepper helps too.)

  Suicide, I’ve read since, is a triggered behavioral mechanism, like throwing up. It has to do with feeling not needed, with seeing your existence in the social hierarchy as superfluous. It is something certain animals do, evolutionarily, so that their offspring can survive on a limited food supply. All that makes sense intellectually, but, looking back on it, I still don’t know why I even contemplated it. I had gotten signed to Wicked; I’d taken the first difficult strides toward my goal; I’d accomplished something by myself for once in my life. Yet I still wasn’t happy.

  And that’s because nothing had really changed. I was still in the same shoebox apartment with no furniture. Not only was I alone and miserable, but I was too sick and broke to even get a gun or pills. When you’re young, that’s the first out you think of because it seems like the easiest. There were nights when I thought I wasn’t going to make it until the morning. I would go to sleep and my heart would feel so weak I thought it would give out. Then I’d have failed my dad because I didn’t have the tools to go out into the world and make it on my own.

  I understand how new girls in the industry feel now. It’s a difficult industry to be in. You make money, but you sacrifice the chance ever to have a normal life. No one comes equipped—mentally, emotionally, or socially—to deal with the recognition, the pressure, or the psychological repercussions of the work itself. Most have no support system to lean on. They don’t realize that the strength they need has to come from within. And, as a result, they often get involved with the wrong person, or the wrong drug.

  I needed someone. I couldn’t do this alone. It was a very depressing realization because deep down I knew it wasn’t true. I had done it alone. I could do the rest alone. But there were those moments—of being scared, of being sick, of being suicidal—where I needed to know that there was a warm, sentient human presence somewhere who would walk through my door at whatever hour, like my father arriving home from work when I was a child, and reassure me that someone on this earth actually cared about me. It has been said that maturity comes in three stages: dependence, independence, and finally interdependence.

  I looked at my calendar and it was March. I had spent seven months in Los Angeles without making friends, going on dates, or even really leaving the house. I needed to stop being a hermit, or I was going to rot in that place.

  The first film I appeared in under my Wicked contract was Priceless. We filmed it at a place called Sterling Studio, a beautiful soundstage run by a cocky, condescending asshole named Jay Grdina, who seemed to have been given a mandate to make me uncomfortable, perhaps because he was dating my predecessor at Wicked, Chasey Lain.

  Since I was allowed to choose the guys I worked with, I decided to try Peter North. I wanted to prove myself, and he was known as the best dick in the business. He was the size of a Coke bottle and could come ounces. On top of that, he had a reputation for being very professional. He barely said a word on set: he just showed up, did his business, and left. To this day, I’ve only heard him utter three sentences.

  Our scene was on the hood of a vintage automobile, and it was phenomenal. When he began to fuck me, I was literally in shock. He tore me wide open, so that it was impossible to do anything but be in the moment. And when he came, he covered the car and me. The guy was amazing.

  The next day, a male performer stopped by the set: Steven St. Croix, an in-demand square-jawed character whose look and intensity people often compared to Ray Liotta. Though we never did a scene together, he took a liking to me. A few weeks after my decision to socialize, he called and asked if I wanted to be his date for an event called Night of the Stars, an annual charity gala run by the Free Speech Coalition. For the first time in months, I said yes to an invitation to leave my apartment.

  I put on a dark blue velvet dress, and he picked me up in a limo he had rented with some friends. I had never made a public appearance before, but as soon as I entered the convention center where it was being held, every head turned in my direction. I felt like Cinderella at the Prince’s ball. Everyone wanted to know who this new girl in town was.

  This was great for Steven’s ego. The guy didn’t leave my side all night. Photographers taking pictures of other stars kept asking them to pose with me. Of course, I didn’t utter more than twenty words all night because I was so unused to being social. I hadn’t made small talk in over a year, and didn’t really know anyone there except for Steven.

  By the time we pulled up at my house, I had a good buzz on. Steven walked me to my door, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and left. I was surprised that he didn’t try anything, but ultimately it was a good move on his part because we ended up seeing each other after that.

  The next thing I needed to do to get a life was buy a car. But at six thousand dollars a film, and only eight films a year, it was going to take forever to save the money. One day, however, Steve made the mistake of asking what he could do for me, and I said I needed a truck. So he took me to a dealership and offered me a Corvette instead. I pointed to a beautiful black convertible, and it was mine. Life was beginning to look up. Now that I could drive myself around, I didn’t need to treat sweet Lyle like a slave boy anymore. Besides, his star was beginning to rise in the business as well.

  Once Buddy saw me driving around in a new Corvette, he started pushing Nikki to get back on the other side of the camera. And the minute he was cool with it, she was cool with it. However, the damage was done and, though I sometimes saw her on set, we never exchanged a word off camera.

  For my first Wicked movies, I kept my mouth shut and absorbed everything that was going on. I looked at how the other girls were being treated (basically, like Tinkertoys) and what type of people got to call the shots (the male directors). I was determined not to just be a fuck toy but also to retain as much power as possible off camera.

  And that was where Joy King came in. Joy had come into the adult industr
y by accident. In 1984, her roommate turned her on to a temp company, which placed her in the accounting department of Caballero. She started out working on the company’s children’s films, but was transferred to the adult division after a couple years.

  As Caballero’s profits began dwindling, Steve was starting Wicked. Though he wanted to work with Joy, he didn’t have the money to add her to his skeleton staff. But the week he hired me, he decided that there might be a use for her after all. So he worked out a deal where she’d take care of an account with a mail-order company, Adam & Eve, on commission, in addition to doing marketing and public relations. It was clear to both Steve and me that making movies was only part of my job. The rest was to promote myself, to work the entire world as if it were just one big Crazy Horse club. So Joy’s number one objective was simple: to get my face in the media. However, she accepted the job before even seeing the product.

  Steve brought us together one day in his office. I took one look at Joy and thought, “This bitch is hot. How can she be a publicist?”

  She looked like she belonged on my side of the camera. She had huge knockers and didn’t wear a bra. In the meantime, I was wearing jeans and tennis shoes. I could tell as soon as she saw me that she was disappointed. “You’re it?” she asked. “You’re so tiny.”

  “Looks are deceiving,” I told her.

  Within fifteen minutes, we were best friends. We had a similar sense of humor and outlook on life: she too was a person who didn’t take no for an answer. A vivaciously friendly party girl, she was also a hard-core motherfucker whom no man dared to mess with. And she radiated sexual energy: I was probably the only girl who worked with her back then that she never slept with.