by Jake Brown
Part V iii
The Rated X Files
My third film, Vortex, was shot in November of 1995. The process of filming itself was becoming business as usual, which is not meant to cheat you readers of any salacious details, but really — if you want those you should go out and buy the videos. I will say that shooting Vortex was nice because it was done in THREE DAYS; EVERYTHING — from the scenes to the box cover. I worked with a fellow adult film star — Annabel Chong and a male lead named Rich O’Shea and another calling himself Jerry who was very well-endowed and nice looking for a change. That movie had a very nice box cover, very sleekly shot, and I had another appearance on Jerry Springer scheduled for that month. Much like Howard Stern, the Springer show was always a desired appearance for any adult film star or wrestling star. Now that I think about it — because the television show’s viewing demographic was almost identical to that which bought our videos, or would come out to the strip clubs to see us on the featuring. I was just reaching a much broader slice of that demographic at once, and I always went out of my way to make the most of it. It turned out that Annabel Chong was also appearing on Springer that same day to promote Vortex, along with the film’s director, John T. Bone. It was a lot of posturing and shit-talking as usual, and as it turned out, the show DID WELL, but it helped me build a rapport with Jerry Springer for future appearances, so that didn’t bother me so much. Besides, it became a mutually beneficial relationship in time, because at one point I was Springer’s highest rated guest, largely based off my World’s Greatest Gang Bang press junket, but that wouldn’t be till later in the spring of 1996. That fall, I also made another important introduction in meeting Vic Chaney, who handled the mail-order fulfillment for merchandise associated with my films.
97 98 what the hell was i thinking?!! As I started getting bigger with each film’s release, the demand for not only videos, but also pictures, t-shirts, my comic book, and related merchandise began to roll in. With the advent of the internet just beginning, he also launched an on-line store on my behalf. It’s interesting to think on how much the internet helped catapult me into the international realm of porn stardom when it likely would have taken years longer without the web.The internet is like a virtual porno magazine and video all in one, it was amazing how quickly the technology spread into peoples homes, bringing me into thousands more bedrooms overnight than I could have ever reached in just video sales and magazine photo spreads alone. John’s people really had their shit together too in adapting the internet model to their promotion of my movies, and Charlie hopped on board with the rest, so I was in good hands in context of promotion.
While they stayed home minding the store, I still was out on the road working my ass off, dancing night after night to crowds that seemed to get larger by the week. I definitely felt for the first time in my life that things were legitimately growing in terms of both my broader popularity nationally, and locally by the number of growing heads as I criss-crossed the country doing my feature dancing. I was home briefly at the end of October for my birthday, which was maybe the only down-note because I spent the day alone, which made me really sad in spite of the climb toward international stardom I’d begun. I took myself out for dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, and actually felt proud of my independence in spite of my loneliness.
Dominic Accara ( Jasmin’s Roadie): Our routine when she was out on the road was first to check into the hotel, and then I would usually go in before and set up her dressing room, knowing how she wanted it laid out — from costumes to boots, make-up tables, the whole bit. So my job was always to be her shadow and make her life easier as the feature. When you’re out on the road, much like a band, and you’re with people from the club, you’re always trying to be nice, because you want to get re-booked, and to get referrals from other clubs, so its part of the game. Jasmin always usually had a pretty solid crowd as well. With new cities, much as with musicians, if you hit a new town, you’re going to draw more because you haven’t been there before. Also if you develop a good rapport with the club owner, the local radio station, the gazette, etc, then you have good word of mouth and the radio stations will plug the shit out of you when you come back. But for Jasmin, even in new towns, she would pack a fucking building to where it was not even funny. When the gangbang came out, this was the case almost everywhere.
When you go into clubs, you make your bread and butter on meet and greets. Your dancing salary is a flat base rate, but most performers make their money in promo sales (T-shirts, Polaroids, etc.) So when Jasmin’s credit, when she went to work, she went to work, no matter what kind of mood she was in after a long night, or however many people might have been waiting in line. Inside the club, they were fans, and she spent the time meeting every one of them. In some ways it was like any other job in that some days you got the best gig in the world, and other days, you wanted to shoot yourself. When Jasmin was on the road, depending on the region of the country, she might spend 2-3 hours taking pictures and doing signings after dancing all night. It was always more on the East Coast and the West Coast, which had nothing to do with Jasmin personally, because in California you see porn chicks everywhere now, but back then it was better.
She toured more in the winter because it was cold out and people had nothing to do but go in tittie bars, so if you went in between November and February, sometimes March, you cleaned up. I didn’t really have any roots in L.A., so I could tour for a month or two months at a time with her, and she worked her ass off during that season so we could be gone that long straight at a clip. The longer you stayed on the road, the less money you spent as well because everything was paid for. We would rent a car and hit the road six days a week, with her doing four shows a night, and then we’d fly out Sunday to the next big city. If we did have time off, we’d go home to L.A. for a few days, but she was out a lot. To me, it was more fun on the East Coast because there were more hard core fans. You had patches on the West Coast. Like Sacramento is big for porn fans, but overall the East Coast was it, it was just crazy. The other thing was if you went to Al’s Diamond Cabaret in Redding, Pennsylvania. Al’s was notorious for being considered the equivalent to playing Madison Square Garden, or making it in the big time in the world of adult features. You did 30 shows a week there, and 30 shows might sound like a lot, but the way the routines were set up, it was a piece of cake, and you made money-money. If she had a 4 show evening at 6, 8, 10 and 12, we’d probably arrive at 5:15. Depending on how far the club was from the hotel, if it was across the street, she’d do her show, then go back to the hotel
10 0 what the hell was i thinking?!! and relax until the next show. If you were working a gig that was a drive away from the hotel, you were stuck in the club all evening and how that went depended on what city you were in. In some cities, things were very relaxed; others were a pain in the ass, especially if you had to deal with local laws that could affect everything too.
Jasmin was one of those stars on the road who, because of her reputation, never really had a problem worrying about people fucking with her, although sometimes people would expect this really hard core personality to show up, and she was much nicer. She played that feisty side up to the media, so that was largely how she was perceived, but it worked for her in terms of club owners playing it straight with her. Because she got on with them, the clubs also let her slide with rules, because they let features slide in general more than house girls. So for instance, there’s a rule that when you’re dancing on stage, the customer has to be six feet away, or when the feature’s on stage, once they take off their top, let’s pretend there’s a rail around the stage, no part of her body can pass that. She can’t lean forward with boobs and stick them in a man’s face, when she’s naked she has to stay in a certain part of the stage and can’t go past, even the features. There’s a club in California in Anaheim, where they literally have a triangle on the stage, and the house dancers — when they get topless — can’t leave the triangle, it’s the most fucked-up thing you eve
r saw. In Chicago, they have these weird stage rules where if you’re throwing posters off the stage, you can only throw them so far into the audience (how are you supposed to judge that distance from the stage?) If you sit down to do a Polaroid, you have to keep your legs closed. Just stupid rules like that.
The other part of being a featured star is you bring more attention, which, in some places, meant more police into the club. If the city had an issue with the club, they would use the feature to try and bust the club on some violation, so there were times where Jasmin had to adapt and work within these ‘six foot’ type rules. Other times they were more liberal with stars like Jasmin, it just depended. In other clubs, they had rules on what kind of music you were allowed to play — heavy metal vs. rap music — but if you were a feature, you could get away with pretty much whatever you wanted as far as the music they played. Sometimes, EVERYONE there was a fan of Jasmin’s, and in those cases, she got to do whatever the fuck she wanted on stage. A good example of that was San Francisco, which granted had more liberal club laws anyway, but still, she was featuring at a club on Market Street, in an anything goes type of club, and she was on stage doing a Dildo show. And I remember she’s up there, doing her thing, looks up, and sees two cops standing at the end of the runway with their arms crossed, right in the middle of her act! She finished her routine, came off stage, and immediately went up to them and asked, ‘What did I do wrong?’ because that was Jasmin, and they surprisingly said,‘You didn’t do nothing wrong, we’re fans,’and after that show, she posed with them for pictures, etc.
People were very respectful of the features, and the club had trained their audience very well, which you didn’t get a lot. In Jasmin’s case, we tried to mix it up and start off with lighter shows, say a nurse routine and a little girl routine for instance, and then as the night went on and the audience got drunker, she’d start blasting Metallica and Motorhead and the dance routines got wilder. It was almost always Metal that Jasmin would dance to, she was always a true metal-head. As far as her racier, later-night routines, if she could get nude, she got totally nude, but that was totally up to the club. She’d do whipped-cream dances, a candle-wax routine where she would pour hot candle wax all over her body, and even did fire shows, where she put fire sticks on her boobs and shot fire out of her mouth. She was a better feature in that she put money into buying costumes, the music matched her routines, so if she was doing the fire routine, we’d play metal songs like ‘Fire Woman’ by the Cult, etc. That turned into a funny story one time. We were flying out from a dance gig to a wrestling gig. I had all the pyro stuff in my carry-on bag. I’d passed okay through security but then when the plane had pulled out about 10 feet away from the gate, and was about to turn onto the runway, it was called back, and I was escorted off the plane by airport security.They spent the better part of 2 hours interrogating me about the contents of my bag, which included all her different stripping costumes. They finally get to this little can of kerosene, and were asking me all this crazy shit about what I had planned for this stuff on the plane. Eventually they let me go, but they also pulled Jasmin aside when her plane landed and questioned her about it too. We both laughed about it when it was over.
Jasmin: Heading into November, John T. Bone and others who I worked with, including my merchandise manager Vic Chaney, were all trying to convince me to move out of Huntington Beach over toward the Santa Monica area. I ended up settling on Marina Del Rey area on the Venice Canals, in a nice little one bedroom for $900.00 a month. I had just a Futon when I moved in, so I went out and got a line of credit for
102 what the hell was i thinking?!! like $1000 at an IKEA-type store, and furnished my whole apartment. I grabbed up some little things from a Pick & Save type place, but it was my first apartment that was fully furnished by the time I was done and I was proud of that. I liked living in my new complex much better than Huntington Beach because the tenants for the most part were either old people or working professionals as opposed to Huntington Beach where they’d all been surfers, burn-outs and body building morons. Or the Valley for that matter where all of my colleagues in the business lived, wanna-be actors and actresses and groupies galore. I liked the environment I lived in because it was consistent with my philosophy of keeping the business and personal parts of my life separate — and living among my co-workers wouldn’t have helped that. That same month, I bought my first car, a beautiful little Mazda Miata, which made me really proud of myself. I was giving myself a lot of pats on the back at that point, because I was really working my ass off, and starting to see the rewards.
I did between 15 and 18 shows a month, and was netting maybe $2500 a week, before Charlie’s ass-rape commission, so that knocked me back to $1625 after he took $825 a week from me. That seems unbelievable to me reading it back to myself now, but my hands were tied at the time. I didn’t know how to stand up to Charlie at the time, and it took me seeing that it would cost me till I did to truly understand the importance of that courage. For instance, when I flew out to my feature gigs, at first my travel expenses only included my hotel room, and not my airfare, which should have been covered as well. That’s just standard, but it took me paying for a few tickets out of my own pocket before I finally got pissed enough to rip into him about it. After that, he got me a $200 plane allowance per feature, so that helped a little, but not much, because I was still dealing with cheap tickets. As I finished out the fall, I also shot my third film, titled Just Jasmin. It felt good to have top billing in the title, and it was a big shoot: 3 scenes, shot up in Sun Valley, all in one day. It had become routine to me by then, one scene had me dressed up in a Cheerleader outfit to satisfy that part of my viewing demographic whose glory days were playing high school football.The second one was for the straight-up freaks, as John had me dressed like Pocahontas.The movie had four male stars: Rick Masters, Rick O’Shea, Dave Hardman, and Steve Hatcher. That wasn’t a walk in the park either, because they were all stars of hard core movies — I’ll leave it to your imagination to imply what that meant in terms of making it HARDER and ROUGHER for me. Given what I had coming up in April with the Gang Bang movie, I looked at movies like Just Jasmin more or less training camp for me, because double penetration was involved in each scene. I also had the routine psychological worry about my co-star pulling out at the right time, which was never actually a problem because it was part of their job to make sure that didn’t happen. Also, I was on birth control at the time, so I wasn’t really in danger of that even if. It was just something you always wanted to avoid, even with STD tests being required.
It was a weird time for me in a way because this huge transition was happening as a result of the nature of what I did professionally — and everything I was able to do for myself personally was an extension of that. I had never imagined doing this in a million years. I am not trying to sound arrogant, but I had an Ivy-league education and spoke four languages. I really went a little bit against type in terms of the typical co-star of mine — a white-trash bitch with no class and more semen than brains in her head at any given time we were working on the same movies. While I was always looking ahead of the moment, these girls could never escape it, and that’s what made them a dime a dozen. My value, on the other hand, kept going up month after month and movie after movie, because it felt like the natural direction of things. If I hadn’t been meant to become a star, then the world wouldn’t have ever embraced me in the first place, the media would never have cared. I had something special to offer that business, a more cultured light to project onto the metaphorical screen in context of how people saw porn stars in general terms. I changed that perception in every press junket I did leading up to the World’s Greatest Gang Bang which would give me my own universe of stars in how it knocked everyone out. They woke up to a new day for porn after that, because I was doing some otherworldly shit in how exotic it was. So heading into the end of 1995, I had to look back a little dazed and dazzled myself, because it had truly been a hell of a year. My en
tire life had begun to change, and I’d watched it pivot in real time, so that I wasn’t just looking back at myself in the mirror anymore, but others around me were starting to recognize me as something special. At that point, my self-esteem badly needed the adulations, so I couldn’t fight it. I became an ally, talking as much shit as I could in any interview to be as exotically over-the-top as my movies and image were. I think I worked well with my handlers, and there wasn’t much ‘shaping’ needed, I set the tone most times naturally with what came out of my mouth. My strategy was to be as shocking as my videos; it was that simple. Once I saw things starting to take public shape, I treated my time in porn like a business plan in my own mind. With projections on everything from how popular I could become in the business to how long I would have to be involved in porn before I could use that popularity to transition out of that genre and cross over into others that were ideally more mainstream. I wasn’t operating under any illusions though in terms of how long it would take me, I knew I was still at the very beginning of what would be a long road out of hell.
That Christmas, I went home to visit my mother. It was really nice being back in a place I knew as well as New York. I had missed sleeping in my own bed, and I enjoyed getting to see my dolls, my little doll house, just all the relics from my childhood. My old books — I was such a bookworm in high school that it would never have matched up with your typical porn star’s bookshelf in a million years. I read everything from J.D. Salinger and Jean Paul Sarte to Albert Camus, and anything and everything by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. My mother was happy to see me, but she kept prying about my life out in California, and I kept with my modeling story. My mother was so removed from that world that there was truly an almost 0% chance of her ever discovering what I was doing. Even if she had, she would have been in such denial that she wouldn’t have believed it anyway if she’d watched it on television. For the moment, things were good though between us, and she was obviously happy to see her only daughter.