by Jake Brown
In February, Rob and I had our final kiss-off when at his next stupid XPW wrestling show he tried once again to persuade me to do a live gang bang in the ring! I thought he’d gotten the message when I’d said no the first time, but that he had the audacity to ask again was even more infuriating and offensive. I agreed to wrestle in the show only, and that’s all he got. Looking back in hindsight at all the men I had to stand up to in my
r eb o rn 20 9 personal life, I take almost as silver lining the hell they put me through in terms of the spine it built up inside me by the time I departed from Rob and Charlie. The steel I had to flex in my resolve — both in and outside of the ring — in the course of showing people I was to be taken seriously about my career change from porn to wrestling was put to the absolute test with my exit. In part, I suppose the resistance from Rob and Charlie had to do with how big a star I still was in that business and the money they stood to lose by my exit. Rob wouldn’t even pay me the money he owed me, telling me after the show and my refusal to do his stupid gang bang that he wouldn’t pay me a dime till I shot more scenes for Extreme.
Being free of Rob Black once and for all was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had in my life, it was better than the best sex I had ever had — on or off screen — and gave me the first complete sense of self I’d had in my life. I was beholden to no one at that point, and what I was choosing to do took balls, because I was the first in the business to leave at the top of my game professionally. I could have opted to stay in front of the camera. Or I could have whored myself out to Rob entirely by going along with his fucking spit-in-the-face ring-gang-bang idea. I thought better of myself, and knew that if I was going to have any shot at making it in mainstream wrestling I needed to be 100% devoted to that pursuit. Rob’s attempt to mix the two in the ring ran contrary to that goal on my part, and it felt good to know I had left Rob Black — and the business — on my own terms. Immediately thereafter, my first act as a free agent was to pick up the phone and make a call I’d been dreaming of making for more than a year, to Paul Heyman, owner of ECW Wrestling.Thankfully when I told him of my decision to leave porn and the desire to come work for ECW full time, he took me in with open arms. He’d say, ‘We’d love to have you here, but need to figure out where we’re going to fit you into the television program, but in the meantime, keep going to wrestling school.’
It made me feel so good that he encouraged me to keep training because I read it to mean he took me seriously as a wrestler. My working with ECW wouldn’t be just a gimmick — it couldn’t be — because the caliber of talent that Paul Heyman employed was a lot more established and regarded than any one Rob could attract. You couldn’t walk into a ring at an ECW show and not know what you were doing. It was the total opposite of Rob’s operation, and I welcomed the challenge. Throughout the spring, I continued my training 3 times a week with Sue Sexton, and did feature gigs on the weekends to sustain myself financially. I was also watching the WWF shows a lot more, and noticed that many of the women who were featured in the ring didn’t know a thing about the sport of wrestling — athletically speaking — they had no training and couldn’t be taken seriously.To reinforce my theory, I attended a WWF show held in L.A. in March where with the Dudley Boys, who I’d stayed in touch with after they’d gone to work there after leaving ECW. They arranged for me to meet backstage at the show with the talent coordinators, and the only spot they would offer me was to being a Ho for a character called The Godfather, where I’d walk him out to the ring with 5 or 6 other girls. Naturally, I turned that down flat, and its not that I expected them to stick me right in a live match, but I wanted to be a character in the story lines — for instance, a manager who walks the wrestler into the ring.
Anyway, attending the match proved to be a good networking opportunity for me, and I met some big wrestling stars, like Mick Foley and Chris Jericho. After the show, I went with a lot of the stars back to the Marriott Hotel bar to unwind, and I saw Damien Steel, who worked for Rob, sitting in a corner of the bar with a hooded sweatshirt on, spying on me! He had no business whatsoever, from a professional standpoint, being there, and lived locally, so that was the only explanation that made sense. Once I pointed him out to the WWF wrestlers, they all started looking at him like he was a stalker, and he got the hint and quietly left. Not long after the WWF event, Paul suggested I start working in the Memphis Championship Wrestling, a subsidiary of the WWE, which was like the minor leagues of professional wrestling where future stars go to train even more intensely than I could have locally in L.A. It was a prelude to my making a professional debut with ECW, and I knew Paul wouldn’t have sent me there if he wasn’t serious about taking me on as a full-time wrestler with ECW. I was training there a few days a week for free, and would work their shows in exchange for the free lessons, and Jerry Lawler ran the federation, so it was also an opportunity to build a rapport with him.
I also attended the March Metal Meltdown in New Jersey that month, which I’d been hired to host, and I wound up meeting the Blue Meanie there for the first real time, and we became fast friends, staying in close touch afterward. I was so stoked to see one of my favorite black metal bands too: DIMMU BORGIR. Amazingly, while I had been off doing my training and dance engagements, Rob had apparently not gotten the message that I was no longer working for him. I found out that in spite of my quitting his outfit completely two months earlier, he had gone ahead and booked that disgusting gang-bang scene in a wrestling ring, and told 8 of the male actors that I still intended to star in the film! This was even after word had gotten out within the industry that I had retired. I was livid and decided to get my final revenge on Robby no-showing him on the day of the shoot and I did it with class. I called each of the 8 male stars the night before the shoot, including some heavy hitters like Brandon Iron. I said, ‘Look, it was really nice working with you in the past, and I hope I’m not costing you work, but I’m not going to be doing that gang-bang scene, please don’t tell Rob anything.’ So I apologized to everyone and did the right thing, and they were all really supportive, ‘Good luck with everything,’ and so forth. I guess a couple of the voicemails I’d left didn’t get to a couple of the male actors in time, and when one showed up and saw the nasty skank they’d hired to replace me with, he got his shit and walked off the set. Rob was pissed, and of course tried to tell everyone he’d fired me, and of course stiffed me on the money he still owed me.
By early April, I was back down in Memphis with the Blue Meanie. The WWE had sent there to lose more weight, and I had been in contact with Continental and the other agency that booked my dance gigs to tell them I was 100% on my own, which felt really good. I did a big wrestling show that Jerry Lawler ran and right away, he put me in a story line with the Blue Meanie. Our teaming went over really well with the audience, and I guess word got back up the chain to Paul, because 3 weeks later, in early May, he brought me up to the pro ranks and made me a formal member of the ECW camp. He didn’t give me any breaks either, because my first match for them was against an African-American female wrestler named Jazz who could wrestle like a guy. Francine, the ‘Queen of Extreme,’ you could tell right off, didn’t like the fact that I was there. As I’d got to know the Blue Meanie and other ECW wrestlers better throughout the spring, I’d also learned that she was fucking one of the talent bookers at ECW, Tommy Dreamer, and was extremely jealous of new female talent. You could tell why too because she looked horrible up close, like the donkey from Shrek, and when my debut went over huge with the crowd, that couldn’t have helped. It didn’t matter after that though because the demand was there, and she couldn’t argue with that. For instance, on ECW’s website, they had a section called ‘Perv Pics,’ which wasn’t nude photos or anything, just little bikini teaser pictures. Anyway, it got back to me that A) I was the site’s most popularly downloaded pictures, and that B) that fact REALLY bothered Francine, who’d been Queen B before I arrived.
Anyway, the ECW Arena was packed with 2500 people that nigh
t, but I swear it sounded like there were 3000, and part of why was the audience hadn’t expected me to come in the ring as a real wrestler, which I think I proved I was that night. I gave Jazz a clothesline in the ring, and then she got up and answered that with a bulldog, which involved her putting me in a headlock and dropping to her knees while I was slammed forward and POWERSLAMMED! Then with the second move, after I’d gotten back to my feet, she picked me up over her shoulders, dropped down on her butt and I went down on my back. It’s funny to me, looking back now, when I hear people say ‘Wrestling is all fake,’because while yes, the moves are choreographed, when you hit the mat, you hit it HARD! People, I suppose, have a right to be misled because a big part of being a wrestler is selling, making it seem like you got hurt really bad. You always have to get carried off stage, because that’s part of the storyline, to make it look real in how it comes across to the crowd.There was a lot of wrestling press covering the show, and the Blue Meanie and I as a team went over really well. At the end of the night, we did some interviews, and then shot some promotional segments for the next week’s television show.
I was happy to have the press, but it was important to me that I’d earned it, rather than being one of these divas from the WWE who just wants to be in front of the camera, and never gets physical in the ring. I was a manager of a wrestler, but I also participated as a wrestler in live matches. The night was a massive success, and I was particularly happy with the exposure it gave me coming right off my retirement from adult film, because ECW was not only a weekly national cable TV show, but also pay-per-view. My profile couldn’t help but go up based on that fact alone, and naturally, I drew fans from my former profession, but also was delighted that I was making so many new ones via the ECW crowd, who really embraced me as a member of their camp. It was heartwarming to say the least, and I hadn’t felt that way professionally in a long time.
After the show was over, Brian and I returned to Memphis, but only for a brief period because his Grandmother had taken ill back in Philadelphia, his home town, so he returned home to care for her. I was still based in L.A., but between my dance and signing engagements, training, and starring in the weekend ECW televised wrestling shows, I was very busy as well, and it worked perfectly for me to schedule my other bookings around ECW’s television or Pay-Per-View engagements. It was like living an entirely different life overnight from what mine had been 6 months ago, and I tried to savor every minute of it, because I’d fought so long and hard to arrive, and things were really good. I was also making a little money from Paul Heyman, but a lot more was starting to come in from eBay selling my adult film memorabilia. Brian also had wrestling fans of his own, so he and I would team up for signings; we had a huge one in L.A. in May, and thereafter started doing A LOT of signings together at different conventions. We made a great team.
Whenever we weren’t working on an ECW T.V. show, we also took a lot of indie bookings together, almost every weekend. Those weren’t televised, but were still packed with fans. We’d get paid for those appearances, then on top of that, combine them with signings where I’d sell photos and clean up big time. As the spring turned to summer, I continued training during the weeks with a new trainer, Mando Gurrero, in L.A., and on the weekends, found myself taking A LOT more signings and a lot LESS dance engagements, which was a nice change of pace for me. I finally felt like I was starting to live a normal life, still with celebrity, and being able to pay my bills from signings, and not having to dance nude before a bunch of strange men.
It was still work: we traveled all over the place for our autograph engagements — Philadelphia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, New York, New Jersey,Texas — everywhere. We were typically flown in, and though we had to cover our own hotel, I didn’t have to pay anyone a commission off of the signings, and just in every way, things were looking better and better for me. It was also fun for me to be able to have my mom see me on T.V. each week with the wrestling show, and then some aunt of mine in Europe saw me on the cover of a wrestling magazine in a supermarket in London. I was grateful, devoted to my work, and appreciative of the fact that the fans were always there to support me — whether at the matches or my signings.
As June rolled around, and we had quite a few wrestling shows that month. Even though Francine was constantly trying to cut down my on-air time out of jealousy, fan demand kept me in the regular ECW rotation for the television and PPV shows. That same month, the Blue Meanie and I were booked to appear at the Milwaukee Metal Fest in Wisconsin, and what was unique about that festival was the promoter incorporated both Metal and Wrestling. We were booked for the wrestling show for 2 days straight. I had my big tag match ever, working with the Blue Meanie against Doink the Clown and Sheri Martel. She was amazing and I loved working with her. I’d always seen her on T.V. growing up, and I thought she was so cool and really admired and looked up to her, so it was quite an honor to work with her. The first time I met her after we’d arrived in Milwaukee, I really wasn’t sure what to expect, but to my relief, when I walked into the dressing room, she was sitting there smoking a joint. Once she’d offered me a hit off her joint, I relaxed, and again, she was cool as fuck to me. She knew I was new to the business, and really went out of her way to make sure I felt comfortable. I loved being a part of this community, because it really was like one big family.
Brian, a.k.a. the Blue Meanie, and I were also getting closer at this point. He was flying out to L.A. a lot. We were kind of a couple at this point, where we were dating but it wasn’t anything too serious. We were briefly involved romantically, but were really more like best friends who tried to have a relationship. I’m almost happier that it didn’t work too because it allowed us to be that much closer as friends, and Brian was always with me. He’s one of the nicest people I’d ever met, and he had drive and ambition, and we worked well together on a lot of important levels professionally and personally that allowed us to accomplish everything we eventually would together. That July, Brian and I had a big, mainstream signing to do in New Jersey for K&S Promotions, and maybe by fluke or fate — I believe the latter — I was reunited with my long-lost friend Sickie! I couldn’t believe it when I ran into him, and he was hanging out with the Iron Sheik of all people. We became best friends again after being reunited, and it was like no time had passed.
In addition to my reunion with Sickie, I felt that particular signing was noteworthy because it marked a shift in the kinds of signings I was being offered, mainly because I was no longer associated with the dirty porn. That was slowly but surely moving into my past in the perceptions of others, and that was underscored by my last appearance on the Howard Stern Show. He’d asked me to fly in and appear on-air with Houston and Spontaneous Ecstasy to speak about gangbangs. I missed my flight due to some cancellation, but still did a call-in interview, and throughout the interview, I laid low and mostly let them argue amongst themselves, because I felt the whole thing was really stupid. I’ll always be eternally grateful to Howard Stern for playing a big role in launching me into stardom, and being supportive of me throughout my career by having me on his show so many times, so my feelings were — and aren’t to date — any reflection on him. It was more that I was just over it, and I was tempted right then and there to blow the whistle on the whole gang bang myth, but I didn’t. I just kept thinking throughout the entire interview: why am I sitting here talking about this with these idiots, one of which was Houston. Once it was over, I knew I wouldn’t do an interview like that again — no matter who offered it to me — because had I, it would have given off the wrong impression about my being finished with porn. Thankfully, wrestling gave me enough profile to not have to worry about it anymore.
As the summer steamed on, everything was going great: I was getting more and more indie bookings and mainstream signings in-between ECW events, and was becoming friends with more and more of the wrestlers. And even though I didn’t have a thing to do with Rob Black’s joke XPW league, I did keep in touch with Big Dick Dudley, w
ho still wrestled for Rob, and he kept me in the loop on their camp. I was happy when he quit working for Rob in later that year in September.That August, ECW had a Pay-Per-View in L.A. called the Heat Wave, they had me shoot a promo for it on the beach with Sinister and Mikey Whipwreck, which opened the PPV. I also met for the first time a WCW wrestler working on the show named Gorgeous George, and boy was she gorgeous! She was very, very pretty, tall and beautiful, and you could right away tell that Francine did not like her. She was very nice, the opposite of Francine, I loved her. Francine ended up getting her fired in September out of jealousy, and I thought it was a real loss for the company.
The only downside of the ECW PPV was the presence of Rob Black’s goon squad. It is not a cute little wrestling nickname for his team of scum fucks, most notably including Krysti Myst, who was sitting in the front row of the PPV and at one point, stood up and started flashing her tits to the audience. All I could think was, is he that desperate? It was rude, and our wrestlers responded to his squad by jumping them in a brawl that led out to the street, and Rob’s whole crew — even Krysti — got their asses kicked! We beat the shit out of them, it even united me and Francine, who wanted to beat the shit out of her.