“I could write you a script,” I said.
He gave me such a side-eye and ignored me.
“No, I’m a writer,” I said.
He laughed at me. Just fully laughed in my face. Now I understand because I have had a thousand people say those sentences to me and not one of them gave me something remotely usable. He’d been pestered for years by people saying, “I have an idea,” thinking it’s so easy to write a porno. I get it and forgive him now, but in the moment? No.
“Go fuck yourself!” I yelled. I went and got my laptop, then stamped my feet down the hallway to the other room to start working on a script. I gave it to him a couple of days later. The look on his face is forever burned into my brain, and I go to it when I am blocked in writing. It was a look of Holy shit, she actually can write. He bought it from me right then and there for seven hundred dollars. He shot the film and then knew exactly how to tease another one out of me. “Think you can do it again?”
I wrote another script, and another script, and another. He was in heaven because he didn’t have to write. I was in heaven because I got to write and got paid to write. Then the other directors at Wicked, who were now Jonathan Morgan and Michael Raven, wanted to buy scripts. I started writing for them. The word got out in the industry that I was a really good writer, at which point Wicked put the kibosh on that and added writing to my contract. So now I was a contract star and contract writer. I could write for anybody in the company but not outside it. After that, I wrote every Wicked movie that I starred in.
When I write, the movie plays in my head as I work. I see it as I write, and because of my memory, when it’s time for the shoot I remember every beat and angle of the film I envisioned when I first wrote the script in longhand. This isn’t a knock on anyone at Wicked, because they’re all fantastic directors, but it was like I had already watched my movie in my head and I hated not seeing it exactly that way on the screen. It could be as simple as imagining the girl wearing a pink dress, not a yellow one, but some of it was bigger changes, and I started to get in huge fights with Brad.
“I’m just gonna have to have you stop coming to set,” he yelled at me after one too many objections from me.
“You’re ruining my vision!” I yelled. Oh, gosh, that sentence haunted me for years. “Don’t ruin her vision” became a running joke in the company. I got in a huff, let’s call it a hufflepuff, and I went in to the owner of Wicked and convinced him that I knew how to direct. Just once I wanted to see if I could take something from my head, to paper, to life. And he said yes. Keep in mind they were still making money to burn if they wanted to. No one could afford to take this risk these days, but back then a thirty-five-thousand-dollar gamble to appease the star was nothing.
So now I had to do it.
I wrote a script called One Night in Vegas with Kaylani Lei, one of our contract stars, in mind. The first day on set, I sat down at the monitor and realized that I’d done the blocking and told everyone what to do, but I didn’t know how to start. Everybody was listening and looking at me and I was like, Oh shit.
Jake Jacobs, the cameraman on my first day as an extra and then my first Wicked film, was standing right there by me with the camera.
“What do I say now?” I whispered to him.
He didn’t blow my cover or rat me out. He whispered, “You say, ‘Rolling, speeding.’”
“Rolling!” I yelled. “We’re speeding.”
He waited a beat, then whispered, “Now say ‘Action.’”
I swallowed.
“You can do it,” he whispered.
“Action,” I said in a voice only loud enough for him to hear.
“Say it louder.”
“Action!”
Thank you, Jake. Halfway through that day, we were shooting a party scene with a bunch of people coming in and out. Of course, I had to make my first movie as difficult as possible with extras and moving parts. As I was standing at the top of this staircase looking down to figure out blocking and timing, I suddenly realized that everyone was looking at me and I was commanding a room of twenty people. I was twenty-two years old, and I had the epiphany that so many people go through life never having that moment where you can say, “This is it. This is what I was born to do.” And I’ve been drunk with power ever since.
One Night in Vegas turned out great, and when the owner of the movie company saw the finished film, directing was quickly added to my contract. Now I was a Wicked contract star, writer, and director.
*
“Who the hell is that?” I whispered to Jessica Drake. We were on set for a movie I wrote called Highway. We were Wicked’s most successful contract stars and had hit it off. I had written us a buddy movie just so we could have fun together. It was based on Thelma & Louise, and I chose Michael Raven to direct. We were shooting at Four Aces Movie Ranch, a set you’ve seen in a hundred movies, with a fifties-style diner and motel. It’s an hour northeast of L.A. in the middle of nowhere, so if you’re there, you’re there for a reason.
“One of them’s got a camera,” said Jessica. “They press?”
“I’m gonna find out,” I said.
The guys had walked over to Lyle and Jim, who were Wicked’s in-house art department. They were hugging, all buddy-buddy.
“Who are they?” I said, not looking at them.
“This is Keith Munyan and Dean Keefer,” Lyle said. “Keith is shooting the box cover.”
Now, I am a creature of habit, as you know. I don’t like change. Brad Willis had shot the stills for my previous box covers and publicity. I didn’t know that Brad had moved on to doing more design than photography, I just knew that it looked like Lyle and Jim had hired their friends to shoot our box cover. I was sure they sucked, and I told Jessica as much when I walked back.
“I don’t really like people photographing me when I haven’t seen their work,” she said. “How do we know he’s not gonna try to sell the photos?” She was older than me and had been in the business longer. I always trusted her opinion and admired her business acumen.
“You’re right,” I said. “He might make me look like shit. I need to see his test photos. Let him audition.” Or quit.
I sat for Keith that first day in the corner of the diner set in the ranch. I sat in a booth across from a weathered bumper sticker on the wall reading AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. Keith is a talker, and I immediately picked up a strong Louisiana accent. I resolved not to acknowledge it or speak to him to reveal mine.
He showed me the first shot on his camera. I smiled and yelled to Jessica through the window. “Okay, we’re gonna be nice to this guy now,” I said. “We’re gonna keep him.”
“What part of Louisiana are you from?” I asked.
“How did you know?” Keith asked.
“I’m from Baton Rouge,” I said.
“I’m from the swamps.”
We laughed, kindred spirits. Keith and Dean were in their forties, partners in business and in life. They’re both good-looking guys, and Keith was a model before he was a photographer. When I become friends with someone, I am all in. I practically say, “We’re gonna be friends now. We’re gonna get bunk beds and do activities.”
I had a shoot coming up, just some content for my website. My photographer canceled and I immediately thought of Keith. I did a day alone with him, and they were the best pictures ever taken of me up to that point. Pretty much instantly, I told Wicked and anyone else who wanted photos, “No one else is allowed to shoot me.” From that day forward, just about every professional photo ever taken of me was by Keith. He had never shot layouts for magazines, and many editors understandably didn’t trust someone they hadn’t worked with before. But I told them that if they wanted me they had to hire Keith Munyan. I didn’t care if it was Penthouse, or Spencer Gifts doing my calendar. He’s with me.
My bond with Keith and Dean proved to be even stronger than friendship. I became so close to them that they finished raising me. I call them my gay dads, and I mean that. If
my biological father gets to call himself my dad, then I sure as hell get to say who my real dads are.
When Brad Armstrong and I broke up, it was Keith who took care of me. I could see it coming, but I didn’t anticipate just how he would do it. Brad was often hard to read and not really affectionate. He would build a little wall of pillows between us on the bed when we slept because my instinct is to cuddle. I also knew that the women he was with had a shelf life of one year. I was pushing it at fourteen months.
One day he mentioned offhand that he was taking Jessica Drake wardrobe shopping for her new movie. I didn’t think much of it, but it put me in the mood to check out clothes that I might want some of my stars to wear. I went to the Westfield Topanga Mall, and just like that day that I saw my high school boyfriend holding hands with that pretty girl at the coffee shop, there were Brad and my buddy Jessica, holding hands as they went up the escalator. I could tell by the way they were acting that this wasn’t new.
I didn’t chase them up the escalator. Ever the director, I wanted the confrontation scene to be just right. I ran to another escalator and went up just so I could do a sneak attack on them.
“Well, well, well,” I said, “this is some interesting wardrobe shopping. How long have you guys been fucking?” Jessica said nothing and couldn’t even look at me. I was as hurt about being betrayed by my friend as by my boyfriend cheating. I wanted to kill her, and Brad had to talk me down. And I left.
In the car, I called my dad Keith. He told me to come over right away. When I got there, I hugged him. “It’s now official,” I said with a sigh. “You’re my favorite person. There’s no competition.”
*
Keith remained my favorite person, even when I woke up accidentally married to someone I’d dated all of two weeks.
I was still heartbroken by Brad and Jessica when I started dating a director named Pat Myne, who I knew by his real name, Bart Clifford. He was in his late thirties and a really nice guy, and had been married to another performer, Shelbee Myne, before divorcing in 1999. Bart and I had been seeing each other for two weeks when we were both in Las Vegas for an adult entertainment convention in 2003. That night in Vegas, I did something very uncharacteristic: I drank. Which is to say that I tried to drown my sorrow about Brad and Jessica in a vat of tequila. The next morning, I woke with my head pounding and my makeup artist friend Christine standing over me holding a marriage license.
“What the fuck is this?” she screamed.
I didn’t remember, but I have since seen photos of Bart and me at a drive-through chapel. I had pink stripes in my hair, which speaks to my insanity at the time. I found Bart in the hotel, and we had to get used to the idea that we were married.
We never really did get used to that idea. I made a go of it because he had a preteen daughter from a previous relationship, Taylor, who he saw quite a bit of. I grew to love her, but Bart and I were only together a year before we decided it was best to split and that what happened in Vegas really just should have stayed in Vegas.
*
Christine, my friend who informed me I was married, was always urging me to talk to my mother. She was otherwise a very sensible person, but I knew that idea was nuts. But Christine had a very good and healthy relationship with her mother and her grandmother. They have been close her whole life. She couldn’t get her head around the fact that I wouldn’t talk to my mom. Society also drills into you the importance of family. “But that’s your mother,” we hear. “That’s blood!” No matter how toxic it is, we’re supposed to just drink the poison, and maybe this time they won’t let you down. There is so much pressure to honor blood ties, when really my chosen family is the people who have always done right by me.
But there was no convincing Christine. One day we were in New Orleans for work. I was competing in the Gold G-String Awards at the Penthouse Club, which had taken over the Gold Club space. I was there with my roadie Scotty and my stepdaughter, Taylor, who was about twelve and off school for spring break. I wanted her to see New Orleans, and I had all my days free during the trip. Christine was there when my mom’s number popped up as an incoming call. I recoiled from the phone, but she insisted I pick it up. When I did, my mom told me she had seen an advertisement about me and the show. It’s one of the biggest feature dancer contests of the year, and she wanted to come see me. She had seen my show, showing up when I was in Baton Rouge and New Orleans; she loved the reactions and she told everyone in the bar she was my mother. “Don’t you give my baby a dollar!” she’d scream. “You give her a twenty!” Any disapproval she had of my life paled in comparison to the attention it brought her.
I initially said no to her attending out of instinct, but Christine convinced me I should give her a chance. I called her back to lay some ground rules before she drove the fifty minutes from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. “You can’t stay the night, okay?” I said. “We have two hotel rooms and all my costumes. Me, Christine, and Taylor are sharing a room, and my roadie Scotty has his own room. With all of the makeup, all of the costumes—there’s no room in this La Quinta Inn for you.”
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.
“No, no, you cannot stay,” I said. If I had said, “Don’t wear black,” she would insist she was on her way to a funeral and needed to. She only wanted something when I wouldn’t give it to her. But I was adamant, because I didn’t know how much exposure I wanted my stepdaughter to have to my mother. Or me when I’m around my mother. I needed to be able to say, “Okay, we’re going to bed, you can leave now.”
I was suspicious as soon as I saw she arrived with a bag.
“What’s that for?”
“Oh, you know, just in case.”
I made eye contact with Christine, who smiled. My mom was on her best sweetie-pie behavior. Butter wouldn’t melt.
“Sheila’s so nice,” Christine told me while my mom wandered around the room, clearly scoping out a place to thwart me and stay the night. “What’s the big deal?”
I turned when my roadie Scotty walked into the room. It had never occurred to me to mention to my mom that he was black. “Scotty,” I said, “this is my mom, Sheila.”
“Ooooooooh,” she said. “My baby’s made it. She has her own black man.”
All I heard was a thud as Christine dropped something behind me. I watched the look on Scott’s face change from certain he had misheard to angry to “Who is this woman?”
I was prepping for my show that has this big huge Smokey the Bear as a comic thing. In the show, I light a campfire and he comes out and says, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” And he “pees” on it with a fake penis. Well, TSA had taken my fake penis out of my bag and kept it. I was trying to make one with a ketchup bottle, but we needed something dark to cover it so it wouldn’t be bright red or yellow on stage. None of us had dark socks—except my mom. She gave us one, we cut a hole in it, and it worked. I was super grateful and I gave her a pair of my socks in return.
“You saved the day,” Christine told my mom. I winced internally, knowing this would just feed her ego. But then I wondered why I couldn’t just let my mother have this moment. Maybe Christine was right.
The show went great, but I could see her in the audience and I noticed she was having a couple of drinks. My mother does not drink, so I knew what she was up to: this was a manipulative tactic, because then it would mean she couldn’t drive. When she said just that, I was very direct. “We’re all going to Denny’s and you’re gonna eat some fucking pancakes and drive your fucking ass home.”
“Oh, I could just lay down in your bed until you get back.”
“Nope,” I said. “No.”
The Denny’s was attached to the hotel and we got there at two o’clock in the morning. I first went up and checked on Taylor, who was sleeping soundly. I went back down and there were a bunch of other performers there, too. We got a bunch of tables together and all sat to eat like a family.
Except my mother, who sat sniffling, going into baby tal
k. I had forgotten she would do that to people when I was little. She started to cry and said, “I don’t know why Stormy doesn’t like me.”
She was putting on a performance, and I knew it, but people who didn’t know her as I did were horrified and thought I was terrible. Everyone but Scotty, who could see right through her. Halfway through the meal, she upped the drama of her scene with an exaggerated cry to the heavens. She stopped short, looked for reactions, and then continued.
“Are you okay?” asked Christine.
“Don’t even talk to her,” I said. “She can sit there and cry.”
Everyone just wanted to leave, but I said, “Nope, I am just gonna sit here and finish my waffle.” Never have I sipped orange juice so slowly. Finally, I finished and the four of us headed to the stairs so she could get her bag and go home. I told her there was no room in my room because I had Taylor in my bed and Christine was in the other.
“You can sleep in Scotty’s room and use a pullout bed,” I said. I saw his head swivel, but I knew she wouldn’t take the bait.
“I’m a fine Southern woman,” she said. “I do not share rooms with black men.”
“Get your shit,” I hissed. “And then leave. You are not staying.”
The real her came through and she began screaming at me, calling me a cunt. Lights started going on in the hotel, so Christine slipped in to get her bag. I took my mother back downstairs to the parking lot to make sure she left. The hotel shared a huge parking lot with a mall, so there was this vast expanse of parking spaces. She had parked near where they were doing construction, and there was a trailer with a temporary fence around it.
She got in her car, still screaming at me. “You stole my sock, you cunt! I wish I’d aborted you!”
“Okay,” I said dismissively. “Okay. I wish you had, too. You have a good night, now.”
She took off in her car, but her rear bumper caught the end of the chainlink fence around the small construction site. The last thing I saw of my mother that night was the taillights of her Ford Escort going across the parking lot, dragging this chainlink fence that’s sparking on the asphalt. “I’m gonna go off the bridge and kill myself and it will be all your fault!” she screamed out the window. “You stole my sock!”
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