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The Other Hollywood

Page 68

by Legs McNeil


  TRICIA DEVERAUX: Marc Wallice was basically blackballed from the whole industry except for a couple of companies. VCA believed his story—that he didn’t know and that he was devastated. He didn’t know what to do, so they took him in as an editor for a while. But eventually even VCA ended up firing him; now he’s editing with a different company.

  MARC WALLICE: I’ve got to start like a regular fucking piece of shit again. A six-dollar-an-hour job. I’m thinking of going to school to learn computers. I need something to do.

  My mother can’t keep giving me money anymore. I have one brother who’s three years older. He’s a fan. He doesn’t know yet. Let him find out from the magazines.

  I’m a big star to them. Little do they know.

  BUD LEE: Marc Wallice is a little boy. Got bigger pants on him, like most of the people in our business. I like him a lot. He’s a good kid.

  SHARON MITCHELL: I also realized that the last movie I did was with Marc Wallice—without a condom. So telling him brought up a lot of things for me, too, which I had to set aside in order to do my job as a counselor.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: I talked to Simon Wolf, who was either owner or coowner of the company that hired Marc Wallice. I’m like, “Why is he editing for you? You know, he basically caused an HIV epidemic in the adult business.”

  Simon goes, “Well, that hasn’t been proven, and he says differently, and I believe him.”

  MARC WALLICE: Now I walk around with my head down, trying to hide, thinking that everybody knows that I infected people with HIV because that’s all they’re going to read. What does my life hold now? A job at McDonald’s in Utah?

  BUD LEE: I got Marc Wallice a job after he was HIV-positive. Why? Well, a lot of us used to depend on the fact that Marc was a home-run king. He’d come on the set, get an erection, fuck as many women as you wanted him to, and he’d come when you asked him to do it. And he did that for us for fifteen years. Saved our asses again and again. We owe him. To make sure that he’s gainfully employed in some way or fashion or another for the rest of his life.

  As an industry, we owe him that.

  SHARON MITCHELL: There’s the question of where those other tests came from. Were they valid? Were they forged?

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: I still laugh at how ironic it is that I wasn’t doing anything outside of the business to get HIV. One of the reasons I came into the business was to explore my sexuality in this safe little community. And because one person betrayed that community, I got HIV.

  SHARON MITCHELL: Was Marc bisexual? Probably, yeah. He had done some bisexual movies, so, you know, it happens that way. AIDS is in epidemic proportions in Los Angeles and in the United States. Why wouldn’t it come into the porn business? Who knows what people do? The guys could be with other guys—and the girls could be shooting dope.

  MARC WALLICE: I used to inject cocaine. About eight years ago, I used to shoot up with Sharon Mitchell and Barbara Holder, aka Aja. If I had it then, they have it, too. But I haven’t done needles in seven years.

  SHARON MITCHELL: I would do a shot five minutes before my scene. But I was a fanatic about using clean needles. I didn’t fuck a lot of people. And I didn’t fuck in the ass and all that.

  MARC WALLICE: I don’t fuck nobody outside the business. I’ve been doing that for seventeen years. Just because I worked with every person who’s become positive, does that mean I’m the reason?

  SHARON MITCHELL: It’s easy for a woman to get it, and if a guy’s exposed to it over and over again, it’s easy for him to get it. You know there’s high-risk categories. People who do pornography aren’t uptight, you know? They’re not executives. They have a lot of kink and a lot of shit going on.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: I haven’t seen Marc Wallice since I found out he’s the one. He didn’t try to contact me. He tried to contact Brooke Ashley, and she basically told him to go die.

  MARC WALLICE: I hear that Brooke Ashley is also pressing charges. I don’t know how she can prove anything.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: Marc Wallice contacted John Stagliano after Brooke; I don’t think he knew that John and I had been talking. Marc said, “What should I do?”

  John’s like, “Dude! You gave these girls HIV! I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to them than I am about what’s going to happen to you!”

  Marc denied it. “No—I didn’t know.”

  John was like, “I don’t want to know you.”

  And that’s basically how that ended up.

  MARC WALLICE: When we’re out together, even my mother says, “Marc, those people over there know you. You’re a star.”

  I used to be a big, famous star. Now I’m a nobody.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: Marc Wallice and I knew each other. We never went out socially or anything, but we both entered the performing end of the business in the very early eighties.

  Before the controversy came about, he asked me to sell his movies and stuff. But we were never really friends, other than the fact that we would talk on sets. I shot him a lot of times in the 1980s, when I started the Buttman stuff.

  But I haven’t talked to Marc since 1996 or 1997.

  DAVID AARON CLARK (PORN WRITER): People say John Stagliano changed everything when he did Buttman—when he took the camera off the tripod and squatted down and followed girls’ butts around. But I think the real thing he did—that really grabbed people—was to use his work to feed his own lust.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: People give me credit for inventing “gonzo porn” because a lot of people have imitated me. But Buttman was just an idea I had in 1989, after I had already started Evil Angel. I was thinking about two things: I wanted to shoot a buns fetish movie, and I wanted to do a movie where the camera was like part of the set, and I was in the movie as the cameraman, and girls could look right into the camera. I wanted to arrange it so the girls could be sexy right to the camera, which turned out to be very effective.

  TIM CONNELLY: John Stagliano ended up living out the Book of Job—porn style. He lost his number-one actress and beloved but troubled girlfriend Krysti Lynn, whom he had been trying to help out of addiction and into a singing career.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I didn’t meet Krysti Lynn until I was shooting her in San Diego. But I arranged to talk to her on the phone before that, through John Leslie, who had shot her in Dog Walker and The Voyeur I.

  I told her I had seen her in some scenes, and I really wanted to shoot her. Yeah, I had a crush on her—yeah, sure.

  BROCKTON O’TOOLE (PORN STAR): John was pretty serious about Krysti. He moved into the nicest place in Malibu, and she moved in with him. They shared a bedroom—the master bedroom.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I managed to make a date with Krysti the next time she came up from San Diego. We went out a few times, and she moved in with me about a month later.

  We had a brief period where we were both really in love. Then it got difficult for me because she had a lot of emotional mood swings and stuff. So after about four months we continued to live together—but we weren’t as intimate as we had been.

  BROCKTON O’TOOLE: Krysti really wanted to have a family with him. And John was dragging his feet.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: Krysti had been in treatment when she was younger; she had a lot of trouble as an adolescent—with her family and drugs and stuff like that. She just had a lot of energy, you know, and expected a lot out of life—and when she didn’t get it, she’d get upset.

  So she continued to live with me for another year without us being actual lovers.

  BROCKTON O’TOOLE: They reached the point where John was going to underwrite a record contract for Krysti because she was a talented violinist and a very fine singer, and she wanted to see if she could make it as a pop singer. So they got some people out from Chicago, and, lo and behold, it turns out they want to work with her.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: Krysti was supposedly going to meet Marky Mark, alias Mark Wahlberg, at some restaurant. She was at my house because we were supposed to look at a location the next morning for her music v
ideo. Krysti had recorded a song, which had been written by Prince and was produced by Ed Strickland, who had been working for Madonna’s company. So we were producing a music video to go along with the song.

  Krysti was all dressed up, and she was playing hard to get, and then Marky Mark’s people didn’t call back, so it was a memorable afternoon.

  Krysti left, and she was going a hundred miles an hour on Los Virgines Road and lost control of the car and went off into a gully.

  She died.

  I never had anybody I was close to die before, so it was a little bit difficult.

  BROCKTON O’TOOLE: John and I were out there when they found the vehicle. I went out there, and the highway patrol had already removed Krysti from the wreck and taken her away.

  Krysti was found under the steering wheel. It was very sad. John was pretty torn up about it. So I have a feeling that the business down in Brazil would not have happened, if it hadn’t been for this. I think he was punishing himself.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: Krysti had a friend in the car with her when they were both killed, and I think John felt responsible somehow.

  BROCKTON O’TOOLE: John was torn up pretty badly. It was tough, but Krysti was driving, and she was at fault, no question about it. And there was this young girl, a secretary, who was also killed. Krysti was driving John’s second car, so her family said to John, “What are you going to do about this?”

  John had a meeting with the other girl’s family, and he says “Let me talk to your lawyer.”

  The family went into another room. John said to the lawyer, “Well, what do you think?” The lawyer says, “Well, I think if you want to settle it right now, I think the family would agree to $250,000.”

  John said, “I’ll write you a check. But I have to give it to the family myself. I want to tell them I’m sorry.”

  And he did—and told them not to worry about the funeral.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: On the first anniversary of Krysti’s death, I was feeling kind of bad about myself. The girlfriend I was with, I felt, didn’t really love me; she didn’t show affection, and I was not feeling good, a little bit bitter.

  So I go down to Brazil.

  TIM CONNELLY: John ended up on a suicide mission in South America, seeking out a Brazilian transvestite street hooker to violently fuck him up the ass without a condom, hoping to drown all his sorrows and guilt.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I’d been drinking a little bit, kind of enjoying being unhappy. Next thing I know I’m picking up this street “girl” and demanding to be fucked up the ass, so lost in my self-pity I don’t care what happens.

  I gamble, and I lose.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: John went down to Brazil, and he got HIV.

  He knew right away that he’d done something he shouldn’t have—the non-condom part for sure. So he started getting HIV tests.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I was real careful the next couple of months, getting tested all the time. I didn’t think I’d gotten it because I really didn’t think he’d taken the rubber off before he fucked me. But for six months I was worried, thinking I had to change my life.

  And then I started thinking, “Man, I wish I could do it again. I’m not going to do it again. But I want to.”

  TIM CONNELLY: John, after being diagnosed HIV-positive, confessed his disease to a more-than-not ragingly homophobic industry, knowing full well the details of his infection would give his jealous detractors and business enemies poisoned fodder for the gossip market.

  And with his courage he proved himself yet again to be of the rarest quality in the smut biz: an honest man.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: You know, I am a little bisexual. I had sucked some guys’ dicks in quarter peep shows and stuff like that, as a variety thing. But primarily, I guess, I’m heterosexual. I just personally don’t worry so much what people think about me.

  But, you know, admitting that I really wanted to get fucked in the ass, and might really like it, is not necessarily a socially acceptable thing for a straight man.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: I met John Stagliano because he called me—he had gotten HIV a year before I did. He said, “Well, you need to have someone to talk to who kind of understands a little bit about what it’s like to have HIV. I could talk to you a little bit.”

  I said, “You know, that would be really nice.” So we went out for a drink at a Mexican restaurant near my apartment. We hit it off immediately, as friends.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I really enjoyed shooting Tricia when she was working. The people in the business today are so much more sophisticated than they were, I think, ten years ago. So I just starting talking to Tricia after she got infected, and several months later we wound up getting together.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: John and I became really good friends, and then he had to go back down to Brazil to shoot a video. And he called me a couple times from Brazil, even though he barely knew me. I said, “This is costing you a fortune.” He said, “Ah, don’t worry about it.”

  Another time, he called me after he’d been drinking a little bit. I told him, “You know what? I think I just have to leave L.A. because everybody just thinks I’m this horrible drug user who was trying to infect them.”

  And John said, “Well, I know things are hard for you. But if you stay, maybe you could, you know—maybe it would be nice to have you around.”

  I just chalked it up to him being kind of drunk; I didn’t think twice about it, and about a month later I went back to the Midwest, for a year and a half.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I grew up in Chicago; I have reason to go back to Chicago. So off and on for the next year I went back three or four times and saw Tricia there. Then she came back.

  Yeah, we fell in love.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: We realized we liked a lot of the same things. We’re both from the Chicago area—and our personalities are very similar, which was what really drew me to him right away because I’d bombed out on two relationships by going for two different extremes.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: Tricia and I have a lot in common. We’re both pretty much type-A personalities; we like the same music, rock and roll; and sexually we’re very compatible.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: What do we tell critics who say we’re only together because we both have HIV? I think that’s why we started to get interested in each other. But if that was all there was, I think we would have broken up. We’re both too strong-minded to stay with someone for that reason alone.

  We’ve had a couple of hard times in our relationship because now that I’m out of porn as a performer I’ve always wanted my relationships off-camera to be monogamous.

  John loves going to strip clubs; he loves hiring strippers to do private strip shows and things like that. And I was like, “Why do you need that?” John was always a very sexual person, so having HIV probably hit him a lot harder than it hit me. Because John was having casual sex, and he had to stop doing that.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I have girls dance for me sometimes—strippers—and when I’ve got their butts in my face I just play with them forever. I really get into focus, and I think, “Oh my God, what I had!”

  In the last couple of months I’ve thought about how fucking incredible Krysti Lynn’s butt was. I mean, I loved fucking Krysti from behind—it was the most incredible experience I ever had. I really enjoyed it, but I never appreciated it—not in the same way I appreciate the little things now.

  TRICIA DEVERAUX: The decision to try to have a baby was difficult for John and me because of HIV. We didn’t even know if it was even possible. Then we read a couple of articles about HIV-positive moms giving birth and the babies not having HIV. So we started talking to our doctors about it.

  I asked the doctor, “Is all this just really good luck?” She said it was a protocol of several different things. The mom has to take HIV medication during pregnancy; I wasn’t taking medicine yet, but I started when I was two months pregnant and took it all the way through the labor.

  The doctor also said the baby would have to take HIV medicine for the first month after sh
e was born. And I’d have to have a C-section because that would allow the doctors to control what would happen with the blood. She said, “If we do all those things, we’ll have less than a 1 percent chance that your baby will have HIV.”

  Even then, we were worried: What happens if she does? But now it’s clear that she still could have lived a normal life—and even if she didn’t, there are worse things in life.

  So we decided to try it.

  The baby, Isabelle, is negative. And she’s a really good thing for both of us.

  JOHN STAGLIANO: I was getting fucked-up the other night watching porno movies. And I thought, this is how you write a movie: You set up this whole scenario where some guy’s doing drugs, he’s about to go too far and OD, and just before he does, he looks at the camera and says, “Fuck you, people! You live by a whole different standard than I do! I have this life in front of me that inspires me. Every one of you has done something at some point to fuck up your life—get a little too drunk, do too much cocaine. That’s life, right? And you’re judging me?”

  I used to judge these people, and I never knew what was going on inside them.

  You know, they’re experiencing life in a certain way that I don’t know about, but I need to know about. We want to push ourselves to experience life and to enjoy it: to be a race car driver, or do drugs, or get fucked in the ass and risk getting HIV—it’s all the same fucking thing. Pushing yourself to experience life to its fullest necessarily involves risk. And if you sit in your room and never do anything—like my mother wanted me to do because she was worried that if I left the house I’d get hit by a car—you’ll never know what life is like.

 

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