by Asa Akira
Her refusal of service was ultimately for the best. Subs are clients for life, if you want them to be. You can’t let them see you in any type of position but strong, or they’ll find someone else to worship. Rox always bounced back up. She never quit for long.
None of the other girls had been working longer than two years. From what I’ve seen, it’s not a job many can stick to much longer than that. In the beginning, it’s liberating. It’s the boyfriend you always wanted to beat the shit out of, the boss you only thought you could be in your wildest dreams, the carnival in town with the biggest collection of freak shows you never knew existed. A whole new world to explore.
Clint had picked me up on the street—almost literally—one night when I was walking back home with Eddie, my then-husband, from a concert. I had a moderate-to-medium OxyContin habit around that time, and there came a point at the concert where I just didn’t want to stand anymore. I had convinced Eddie to leave early. Oxy is a versatile little pill, in the sense that depending on how much you take, it can be like five different drugs. You’re in complete control of how high you are. Take a little, and you’re a perfectly functioning human being. No one can tell you’re on anything. Take a lot, and you’re all “I think my eyes are open. Are my eyes open?”
That night I had only taken a little. When I was on this level of high, it was a common occurrence for me to be walking, talking, excuse myself to go throw up on the side of the street, wipe my mouth off, and then come back to the conversation like nothing had happened.
“You okay, Peanut?” Eddie yelled from the hot dog stand as I finished barfing on the side of a building. I could never understand how Eddie could eat on Oxy.
“Yah. One second.” I was spitting out what was left in my mouth when Clint approached me.
“Excuse me, miss?” Fuck. Tell me I didn’t just puke on this man’s wall. “I’m sorry to bother you; can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” Really? Now?
“Would you be interested in working in the adult entertainment industry?” This guy was bold.
“Sure. Let me get my husband.”
Dungeons always smell the same way. A base of rubbing alcohol, with high notes of metal and semen. I’m not the kind of person to walk into a room and claim, “Ooohhh, the energy in here is so weird,” but let me tell you—the energy in a dungeon is fucking weird. It’s almost like the air is a little thicker. Looking back, I can’t believe we followed Clint upstairs, much less agreed to start training the next day. But I had always wanted to work in porn, or a stripclub, or do something in the adult world. Eddie, my friends, everyone around me knew that.
Day one, I was already in heaven. My first client was a pro baseball player.
“I want to role-play like we’re on the subway. I’ll like stare and stare at you, and you’re like just totally creeped out by me.”
My second client gave me an hourlong foot massage. Another guy wanted me to piss on him. Five clients in total booked me that night. I left feeling like I had found my calling.
I should mention now that I’m not sexually dominant in my personal life. Ironically, none of the girls working at Nutcracker were. Not even Rox. We were all submissive in nature, to one degree or another. At that point in my life, I didn’t recognize myself as submissive or dominant. I just knew I liked to please.
Eventually, I met Ronnie, who had seen every dominatrix in the city. Every single one. He never saw the same one twice. It was bound to be my time sooner or later. Before I introduced myself, the girls let me in on what he was about.
Ronnie has a dentist fetish. And elephantiasis on one of his balls. Maybe it’s not fair for me to label it as elephantiasis. But one of his balls is fucking huge.
Anyway, what Ronnie does is he brings in his own dentist kit to the session. He always books an hour and a half, never more, never less. He will try to persuade you to shoot his mouth up with Novocain, but from what I hear, he’s only succeeded in getting two girls to go through with this.
When I walked into the medical room, Ronnie had already set himself up in the chair. The rumor is that he bought this chair himself and had donated it to the dungeon. I have yet to meet another client with a fetish involving a dentist chair, so this makes sense.
Ronnie had a bib around his neck, and his dentist kit was laid out on the counter for me.
“How are we feeling today, Ronnie?” I started.
“Hi, Doctor, I feel like there’s a loose tooth. I think I need it looked at.”
I slowly put on my latex gloves as I listened, even adding the snap at the bottom like I had seen in pornos.
“Open your mouth wide, say ‘ahhh.’” I dug around his mouth and felt the latex squeak against his teeth. “Which tooth is the one we’re concerned about, Ronnie?”
“The third molar from the back, on this side.” He motioned his hand up to the left side of his face, the side I was on.
“I see.” I wiggled the tooth in question. “This doesn’t look good, Ronnie.”
“Do you think you’ll have to pull it out?” The sudden excitement in his voice was impossible to miss.
“I’m afraid so, Ronnie.”
After that, I didn’t know where to go. I mean I wasn’t going to pull this man’s tooth out. So I just repeated “It doesn’t look good” over and over, and kept wiggling.
I did this for the entire session.
After he left, I was embarrassed at how my mind had failed me when I tried to think of more dentist things to say. To everyone’s surprise, he came in for me again the next night. He had never booked anyone more than once. I don’t know what I did right. I repeated the same exact session for the second night in a row.
Around that time, I also met Eli. Eli was a trust fund kid. He technically owned a dance company, but fundamentally, he didn’t work. Almost every night, he would come in and book double, triple, sometimes quadruple sessions, back to back. To be honest, I don’t really even think Eli is a sub. He liked his nipples pinched hard; as far as I knew, that was about the freakiest thing about him, sexually.
The thing about Eli that made him so special was that he smoked crack.
Growing up in New York City, I discovered drugs at a young age. I dropped Ecstasy for the first time at thirteen. By fourteen, I had tried every drug there was available to me, except crack and heroin. Acid, mushrooms, pharmaceuticals, angel dust, salvia, coke, speed . . . But Special K was my favorite. My best friend Dee and I would regularly buy a liq each day after school, cook it up at night, and snort the powder in the morning before leaving the house to make the subway ride to school enjoyable. That’s how much I loved it. Somehow I never got physically addicted to anything, and I was fully sober (including alcohol!) by the time I was twenty-two. Starting drugs at such a young age, I think, was a blessing in my case. By the time I was an adult, I was over the whole partying scene, and ready to join reality.
Crack was something my circle had always looked down upon. We smoked weed every day and did harder drugs on a weekly basis, but crack and heroin were out of the question. Those drugs were for losers. We were above it.
I had never actually met a crackhead in real life. Nor did I have any desire to. In my mind, crackhead was somewhat synonymous to homeless.
When the girls told me about Eli, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I didn’t understand how Clint could let some disgusting lowlife, a crackhead, come under our roof. To think he let him smoke crack during the sessions—I just didn’t get it.
Until I met him.
My first session with Eli I did as a favor to Clint. I walked into the torture room half expecting to meet a guy wearing a blanket and pushing a shopping cart. How could Clint let this guy book me? I went to a Manhattan private school, for crying out loud.
Eli took me by surprise. He was nothing how I had imagined—he was in sweats, but they were from Zegna. He wore a black carbon fiber Hublot watch I had never even seen before, that I knew cost at least $250,000. Definitely not hands
ome, but he didn’t have the face of someone who was broke. Or broken.
This guy smokes crack?
The first few sessions I did with Eli, I just pinched his nipples and listened to him ramble for however long he had booked me. His stories bored me half to death. I dreaded his sessions.
His ideas were grandiose and unrealistic, and I never knew which of the things that he said were true, and which were lies or exaggerations. He offered me a hit at the beginning of every session and, most of the time, again halfway through. I always turned him down. I had no interest in smoking something that would make me act like that. Besides, I had my Oxy, and that was enough for me.
Then one night, I caved. I could sit here and endlessly list excuses. I was bored. My Oxy was wearing off. I got curious. He pressured me.
The truth is that I just did it, without any thought. He made his obligatory offer at the beginning of a session, and where I usually answered No, I blankly nodded Yes.
Describing the first time I smoked crack feels like describing the moment I discovered true happiness.
I smoked through a glass pipe and felt the thick smoke enter my chest. It’s not like weed or tobacco smoke. More chemical-ish, the vapor is almost cold as it fills you. The moment you inhale it, you feel your reality shift instantaneously. As you hold the smoke in, you get higher and higher—it’s as if you can literally feel the crack spreading to the rest of your body, starting at your lungs. One cell at a time, your body becomes a whole other being—a happier, lighter, more energized being. It’s like waking up from a coma and your life is a whimsical musical number in a Disney movie.
“This is amazing,” I heard myself telling Eli. “I can’t stop smiling.”
Eli was smiling back at me. “I told you.”
In that moment, I loved him. I loved crack.
Just as those thoughts formed in my mind, I felt a little less high. Or was I imagining it? No, it was definitely happening. I was coming down. Every two seconds that passed, I felt my high slip away from me a little bit more. I held my breath in a panic, as if that would keep the crack from escaping my body. No. No. This wasn’t fucking happening. It felt so good such a short amount of time ago. I looked to Eli. He knew what was happening. I needed another hit.
I saw why crack was considered the most dangerously addictive drug. The high is too good. Losing it is too painful.
Eli came in for sessions for the next two nights, and we got high together. It was miserable. I didn’t sleep when I went home, my mouth was full of canker sores from nervously chewing my lips, and I never felt like I did that first time, no matter how many hits I took.
At the end of the third night of my crack binge, I lost it.
I didn’t act out in any way—in fact, I did just the opposite. It was hard to speak or move. I could walk from one end of the room to the other, but walking felt uncomfortable. Sitting down felt uncomfortable. Everything felt disgusting.
I managed to text Eddie, who was my ex-husband by that time. “911. Come get me. At Nutcracker. Please.”
Eddie picked me up in a cab. We weren’t getting along at the time; we had separated only a few months ago after what seemed like an eternity of sucking the life and light out of each other’s souls. The days of him calling me Peanut were long gone, and we rode in silence. I didn’t tell him what was going on. It was dawn already; the sun was coming up. Something about that hour when night turns to day makes everything so much worse when you’re on drugs. He took me back to the condo we had lived in together, and all I wanted to do was close all the curtains and crawl into bed, under the covers, with a Xanax. Alone.
I ran upstairs to the bedroom. The blackout curtains were closed. Thank God. I looked in Eddie’s underwear drawer and found a bottle of Xanax. Double thank God. I dived into the bed.
Something felt wrong. What the fuck? Are the sheets wet? I couldn’t decide if I was imagining things. The sheets felt damp and cold. Had I fucking pissed myself?
I got up, turned on the light, and pulled my panties down. Bone dry. I put my hand on the sheet. It definitely felt wet.
I yelled downstairs. “Am I crazy, or are the fucking sheets wet??” Communicating took so much effort. There was no room for me to use my manners.
“I washed them earlier; when I took them out of the dryer they were still wet—I thought I’d let them dry on the bed.”
Are you. Fucking. Kidding me. Right there I started to cry. Shit like this only happens when you’re high as fuck.
Men are such morons, the Xanax hasn’t kicked in yet, and all I want is a bed. “Get the fuck up here!” I screamed down to Eddie, who was already heading upstairs to me.
“What the fuck is your problem? Yo, what are you even doing here?” Eddie’s New York Puerto Rican accent always came out more when he was mad.
“I fucking smoked crack, you asshole! All I want is a fucking bed and some peace and quiet, and you had to be so fucking stupid and put WET SHEETS on the bed! Now the mattress is wet and there’s nowhere to fucking sleep! And I’m fucking coming down from crack!” I could hear myself yelling like a legitimate crazy person, but I didn’t care. “Just GET THE FUCK OUT!”
Eddie was laughing at me, which enraged me even more. He turned around and left the room. I slammed the door behind him. I was so fucking mad. And all I wanted to do was curl up under the motherfucking covers and have a moment of peace. I was so damn uncomfortable.
I walked to Eddie’s closet and started throwing all of his clothes on the floor. I made sure to make enough noise for him to know I was fucking shit up. I stomped unnecessarily and rattled the drawers. I left nothing hanging. I turned off the lights, lay down on the mountain of sweaters, shirts, and pants, and put his robe over me. I buried my face into Eddie’s clothing and screamed into the pile.
The Xanax finally kicked in.
It would be another year before I got sober, but that was the last time I smoked crack. Eddie went to jail shortly after, when his bookkeeping business got busted. He called me the other day, collect. I asked him if he remembered the time I smoked crack and acted like a mental patient.
“Yo, you were always the best, Peanut,” he laughed. “I’m proud of you.”
5
Liar Liar
Halfway through my second year in porn, when my career was really starting to take off, I started to get bad acne. It was the cystic kind that covers the entire face, the kind of acne where you see someone, and it’s the first thing you notice about them. Eventually I got to the point where it put me in such a deep depression that I didn’t leave the house unless it was for work. I blamed porn. Every day, a different makeup chair. Thick layers of product caked onto my skin, only to sweat half of it off during the sex scene. I’d have to get back into the makeup chair, and get more product caked back on over my sweat to shoot the rest of the scene.
It was crippling. It hurt my feelings. I felt betrayed. How could you, Porn? I love you. I do everything you ask for. When you wanted to see me put my fist inside my vagina, I did that. You want to inspect my asshole using a speculum? Sure, why not. Double anal? You got it!
I gave you everything. In return, you gave me a disfiguring rash on my face.
I kept hoping time would make it would go away, but it didn’t. Thousands of dollars were spent on spa treatments, expensive creams and lotions, homeopathic remedies. Reluctantly, I even tried to slow down on shooting in hopes it would get better. Acne is especially bad for porn; between rubbing spit-covered cocks all around my mouth, making out, getting my face smooshed into furniture, and sweating like a pig under the hot lights, the makeup never manages to stay on. I’d start off the scene looking like a pornstar, and end it looking like a monster. No one was saying it out loud, but I knew I was losing work because of my skin.
During this miserable time in my life, I got booked for a softcore movie for a big cable network series. Shooting a softcore movie is completely different from shooting a hardcore one, which is what I usually have the pleasure of do
ing. Once or twice a year, I’ll agree to these “Skinemax” type projects, but every time I get to the set, I remember: “Oh yeah. I hate this shit.”
The first thing about these softcore productions that makes me want to shoot myself in the face is that the cast consists mostly of mainstream actors, meaning, they don’t do actual porn. They are aspiring “real” actors who happen to be comfortable showing nudity. This is just a pit stop on their way to achieving their dreams.
Which, by itself, is fine.
Except that now, it leaves me to be the target of their objection. I’m the smelly kid in the class. I become the one who no one wants to stand near, in fear that they will catch my New and Improved Airborne Super-AIDS.
Second, and perhaps this is the main thing, there is no real sex.
Like, not even with a condom.
We are shooting simulated sex—actual penetration never happens. We have to wear these paperlike G-strings (guys included) so that our genitals never even touch. The whole reason I got into porn in the first place was for the sex. What is this bullshit? It’s certainly not what I signed up for is usually my secret mood by the end of the day on one of these jobs. Every moan and scream is dishonest, and something about knowing I have to pretend I’m getting fucked, when I’m really not, makes me say stupid and outlandish things like “My little pink pussy feels like a flower giving birth to your big beautiful rocket!” or “Fill my gushing river of a pussy up, you sexy bastard.”
I’ve never been good at lying.
So my skin was making me hate life, and I was on a set where everyone thought I was disgusting, when Roger, the director of this stupid softcore production, asked me to stay after everyone had left. Great.
This is another thing I hate about softcore sets. I’m automatically assigned the role of “resident slutface,” and I have to explain (usually to the director or the producer) that I’m just there to do my job—which, on this particular set, as I’m all too aware of, is not to have sex. This hardly ever happens on a hardcore set; as the legendary Nina Hartley so eloquently puts it, “You don’t fuck to get the job. Fucking is the job.”