by Asa Akira
I mentally rehearsed my usual “I have a boyfriend, we don’t sleep with anyone else outside of sex scenes” speech and entered the room Roger had set up to be his office.
“So you wanted to see me?” Roger was standing at the desk pretending to go through some paperwork. Typical.
“Can you shut the door? I want to talk to you in private.”
I shut the door and walked closer to Roger, but not close enough where he could easily touch me. I wondered if there would ever come a time in my life where I wouldn’t measure distance by the amount of time it would take for a person to physically come on to me.
“What’s going on with your face?” Roger was looking at me dead in the eye.
I was surprised. “Wait, what?”
“Your face is practically unshootable. I don’t even know if we can use any of your close-ups. It’s not good. I know you’re not on drugs. What’s going on?”
I wanted to cry. “Is this what you called me in for?”
“Honey, you need to do something about that. This is your career we’re talking about here. I can’t hire you again until it’s taken care of.”
I wanted to punch him. One thing I despise above anything else is when people call me by pet names. It’s condescending and gross. Did this guy realize how much of an asshole he was coming off as? I swallowed my pride and decided to get out of there before I really did start crying.
“Thanks. But I’m getting it taken care of. I gotta go, Yoga starts in thirty minutes.”
After that day, I made the decision to go on Accutane. I had heard countless horrible things about the drug, but it was my last resort. Fucking Roger said I was unshootable. Dick.
Accutane is definitely a drug to be taken seriously. The little pills come individually wrapped, and on every single pill there’s an image of a pregnant woman, with an X over her. I signed a contract promising I wouldn’t get pregnant, and if I did, I would abort it. After googling “Accutane baby” and seeing horrifying things, I saw for myself why all this precaution was absolutely imperative.
Imagine the first woman to have a baby while on the drug. Like some poor lady with acne gets pregnant, she’s all excited about starting a new life with her baby. Her face is probably finally starting to clear up, but BAM, when the baby is born, he has a head shaped like a fucking cone and eyes on the sides of his head like a damn horse. It’s moments like this when I remind myself to be grateful that I have ten fingers, ten toes, and an (although bigger-than-average) normally shaped head.
My skin problem was fixed. Unfortunately, my hair was another story. Although, comparatively, my hair situation wasn’t that bad, there’s still no quick fix for porn-damaged hair. Once it’s fried, it’s fried, and you just have to wait for it to grow out.
Blow-dried, straightened, curled, teased. Every day. I don’t know who suffers more—me, with my limp, breaking, dying hair, or Toni, my now husband, who has to look at my old Facebook photos yet again as I reminisce, “My hair was so shiny. Do u see? How shiny?”
When I remember to, I just suck it up and tell myself that split ends are a small price to pay to make a living having multiple anal orgasms.
I’ve had the same hairdresser for the entire time I’ve been in California. I’m an easy sell, so naturally, Rose loves me. Don’t even bother asking me to count how many “New! Revolutionary! All the rage in Brazil!” useless treatments I’ve paid her for.
When I first met Rose, I had just moved to L.A. to really start making the porn thing happen.
“So what do you do, babe? You’ve been coming here for months and you never told me.” Hairdressers always ask too many questions. And she called me “babe.” Ew. If I could find a mute person to cut my hair, I’d be all over it. Unfortunately, for now Rose was the only one who didn’t cut too much off when I asked for a trim. So I’d have to stick with her.
“I don’t really work. I have a boyfriend that supports me.” Lie. I didn’t even have a boyfriend then. But I didn’t want to tell her the truth. What if she is a religious nut? Or a women’s rights activist? If she has something against porn, she might fuck up my hair on purpose. It was too much to risk. “I guess I got lucky.”
“Oh, that’s nice. What does he do?”
“Oh, you know . . . He owns businesses and stuff.” Nice. Vague but doesn’t make him sound like a loser.
“That’s cool. What type of businesses?” Rose is relentless.
“I can’t really talk about it. It’s illegal.” Did I really just say that?
“Okay. So where are you from?”
“New York City.” Finally, something I could talk about without lying.
“So you came out here to be with your boyfriend?”
“I guess, something like that, yah.” Er.
“Do you want to marry him?”
“I think so.”
“Is he Asian?”
“No. Italian.” Who am I?
Over the next three years, I continued to lie to Rose. She asked so many damn questions, I started to get used to it. I created a whole other persona, an entire alternate life in which I was the fabulous girlfriend of a drug dealer. We lived in Beverly Hills and had two dogs together. Somewhere along the way, I started to lie way more than was necessary. I was offering information on nonexistent family members, vacations that had never happened, and how I had finally found my calling and was writing a novel. We even talked about porn once. I told her my boyfriend was too jealous to let me do anything like that.
I should have known better. I always get caught lying, which is why I try to do it as little as possible. The last big lie I had told was to my parents in 2007, that I was attending a college in Florida. What I was really doing there was working for a radio show as the “show whore” and dabbling in girl-on-girl porn. They found out.
One day, I went to shoot for a company that I had never worked for before. Late as usual, I rushed in. The makeup artist was already set up and waiting, so I apologized and sat straight into her chair.
In porn, the makeup artist usually does both face and hair. The hairstyles aren’t all that elaborate, so it’s not really a problem. Occasionally, the makeup artist will bring in an assistant to do the hair, and they’ll split the rate paid by the company.
That was the case on this shoot. The makeup artist, whom I had never met, had brought someone. The assistant, who was set up on the other side of the room, looked familiar to me. I just assumed she had assisted someone else before.
She kept looking my way as I got my makeup done. After almost an hour of this, I deliberately didn’t look in her direction, to avoid the awkwardness. She was making me self-conscious. It’s like she wasn’t even trying to be subtle about it. What does this bitch want?
When my makeup was done and it was time to get my hair done, I was sent into the assistant’s chair.
“How’ve you been, babe.” Holy shit. Babe. It was Rose.
“. . . Oh my God, hey!” I stood up to give her a hug, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do.
Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting to see her in this environment, but I swear I didn’t recognize her. No wonder she looked familiar. She had been cutting my hair for the past three fucking years.
We didn’t talk about it, but we both knew. It was too awkward for me to bring up. I wouldn’t have known where to even begin.
I think she wanted to avoid embarrassing me. There were other people in the room. I’ll always feel thankful to her for that.
I still see Rose. She’s still the only one I trust to not cut off too much when I ask for a trim. She never asks me questions anymore. In fact, we hardly even speak except for when she asks me what I need for my hair. I suppose if I really wanted to, it wouldn’t be so hard to tell her the truth now. “I’m not writing a novel, I don’t have an Italian drug dealer boyfriend, I live in the Valley and I’ve been in porn the whole time you’ve known me. But you knew that. I’m sorry, I never know what to tell people at first. I guess you kn
ow my secret now!” We could probably have a laugh about it. She might even give me a discount due to our newfound camaraderie.
But why on earth would I do a thing like that?
I have finally gotten my mute hairdresser.
Haiku
Q-tip in my ear,
If my pussy were to break;
You would be enough.
6
Crime and Punishment
I was twelve years old when I discovered I didn’t have to pay for things in order to own them. Attending the United Nations International School (UNIS) at the time, I was surrounded by the Manhattan elite. Spoiled trust fund babies, and children of diplomats who arrived to school in black limousines with special license plates. That’s not to say personally I grew up particularly rich. My grandfather, before suffering a stroke and being confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, served as a diplomat for forty-five years. UNIS granted me a scholarship, upon returning to New York City from six years spent in Tokyo.
“Come with me and Jenna after school,” Georgia whispered in biology class. “We’ve been stealing Hello Kitty stuff from FAO Schwarz.”
The idea of shoplifting, by itself, didn’t really interest me. Georgia and Jenna were the most popular girls in the seventh grade, though, and I was still just the new kid. We were already halfway through the school year, but these kids had all known each other since preschool. It wasn’t easy fitting in. I jumped at the chance.
“Okay. I gotta call my mom.” I called from the pay phone in the cafeteria during lunch.
“Ask her if you can sleep over,” Georgia mouthed to me.
When we got to FAO, we walked straight upstairs to the Hello Kitty section. Georgia and Jenna picked up any item they saw that sparked their interest, and didn’t stop until they couldn’t carry any more. I grabbed a few pens.
“C’mon, let’s go to the escalator,” Jenna said, and walked ahead of us.
“The elevator is the one spot there’s no camera,” Georgia explained out of the side of her mouth.
We went to the escalator and stuffed our findings into our schoolbags, then casually walked out of the store.
It was that easy. It was too easy.
Over the next six years, I would go shoplifting on a regular basis. Georgia and Jenna accepted me as the final piece to their trio, and we would go on sprees almost every day after school. We outgrew FAO Schwarz within a few weeks after that first day, and moved on to hit the stores in SoHo. Everywhere from the GAP to Ralph Lauren, there was no store too small or too big for us to take on. At the beginning of each session, we’d stop in a few high-end stores and ask for paper bags, claiming our school bag had broken, or we needed them for a project for social studies class. This way, when we entered the stores we were going to steal from, we looked like legitimate customers enjoying a day of shopping with Daddy’s money. At twelve years old, I owned a $2,500 cashmere sweater from Ralph Lauren, which I washed in the washing machine at the local Laundromat.
We made games out of our trips. Some days were designated to finding gifts for each other. Instead of stealing for ourselves, we would only take things for the other two. At the end of the day, we would sit on the living room floor of Jenna’s townhouse in Gramercy Park and take turns presenting our gifts to each other, like Christmas morning. Jenna’s dad owned a printing company, and her parents were never around; they owned a house in California and vacationed to Europe often. She and her sister basically were underage roommates living alone in one of the most coveted pieces of property in Manhattan.
It was only a matter of time before we found other opportunities to incorporate our newfound deviance. On weekends, we’d head to pet stores to buy crickets and bring them to restaurants. Never hitting the same place twice, at the end of our meal we’d bury a cricket in a plate of food.
“Excuse me. I can’t be sure, but I think there’s a bug in my food. I really don’t want to make a scene, but could you take a look at this? Actually, could you call your manager over?” Taking turns acting as the victim, once the manager came we’d claim our father was a lawyer, and have our meals comped immediately. With our freshly stolen expensive clothes and high-end shopping bags, no one ever doubted us.
One night, after a long day of hustling, Jenna and I went out to dinner at a busy restaurant in the West Village. It was the kind of restaurant that doubles as a bar, and we had to speak directly into each other’s ears just to be able to hear one another. We hadn’t planned on anything, not even a dine-and-dash. But before our appetizers arrived, we almost simultaneously spotted a woman seated next to me, with her purse on the floor, completely forgotten. We widened our eyes at each other, at the prospect of what we were potentially about to do.
“Should we?” I mouthed to Jenna.
“Let’s take it to the bathroom and see if it’s worth it,” she in turn yelled into my ear. Jenna was always the ballsiest one.
I grabbed the purse and we went down to the bathroom.
The inside of a woman’s purse is a good gauge of what type of person she is. In some ways, it’s more intimate than an actual conversation. For example, a messy one means she probably doesn’t change purses often, and prefers stability and monotony. Find a passport inside, she’s likely spontaneous and flighty. Toothbrush or condoms, total slut. A mini umbrella always signifies responsibility.
This particular purse was nothing special. Wallet, tampons, gum. No coins at the bottom; she had changed her purse just for this occasion. In her wallet were the basics: IDs, credit cards, cash.
And receipts. Tons of them.
I started to backpedal. This was a woman who paid her own taxes. I assumed she was freelance. Probably, she had the mentality of “every penny counts.” I knew because my dad is the receipt Nazi. Anytime he took a cab, ate at a restaurant, purchased an electronic item, he double-, triple-checked he had stored away the receipt.
“I think I saw a camera outside. What if she reports it missing and they see us on the video?” I wasn’t about to admit I had gone soft. To my surprise, Jenna readily agreed. Maybe she was having second thoughts as well. Stealing from an actual human being was uncharted territory. We returned upstairs, purse in hand, and placed it back down on the floor next to my seat. Our food arrived shortly, we ate, paid for our meal, left a tip, and headed back to Jenna’s.
After entering highschool, the trio slowly broke up. I met an older boy, Kevin, and spent most of my time with him and his pothead friends. My hobbies, although they still included shoplifting, gravitated more toward drug-related activities. Georgia continued being popular at UNIS, and Jenna eventually moved out to the West Coast with her parents. Sometimes I went shoplifting alone, sometimes with my best friend Dee. A few times I took Kevin on a stealing spree and got him anything he wanted. I never felt bad; I wasn’t stealing from anyone personally, and besides, I was living by the phrase “Fuck the Man” at the time.
At age eighteen, I got caught for the first and only time. I should have known; the day was gloomy and raining, exactly the kind of weather right before bad things happen in movies. It was November, and I was stealing a bottle of perfume for Dee’s birthday present. As I was about to walk out of the store, an employee called out to me.
“Excuse me, miss, please follow me.”
My heart started to race. I began to feel dizzy. I followed the man to the back of the store, where they showed me a video of me putting the perfume in my purse. To this day, it makes me cringe in shame when recalling the image of myself crouched over, looking around to make sure no one was watching.
The police took me to the station, and after a few grueling hours, they drove me to Central Bookings, where I would spend the night. I was in disbelief. I had never been caught, and I always thought that if I had, it wouldn’t come this far. Central Bookings was for crimes like selling drugs and tagging buildings, certainly not for little girls like me.
To get to the women’s side of bookings, after taking your shoelaces, keys, and oddl
y enough, tampons, the guards walk you past a few rows of cells on the men’s side. There were around fifteen men to a cell, some of them sitting in the back, others right up against the bars, yelling for things like water and food, or complaining about the temperature. They weren’t talking to each other; they weren’t really even talking to the guards. No one was paying attention to them; they were just yelling out into the atmosphere. As we walked past, I couldn’t help but feel like we were walking through a zoo. It smelled disgusting, it was loud, and the air was chilly but thick. I didn’t belong here.
The women’s side was completely different. I was put in a cell with one other woman. There was a TV on the other side of the bars, easily visible from any angle within the cell. The toilet had a door; it was a door with no top or bottom, as if someone had cut off the two ends and just left the middle part. It was a door nonetheless. There was a mattress on the floor, and benches all around. It was cold, but it was still; there was nothing of the cold draft I felt on the men’s side.
I sat down on a bench in the opposite corner from the other woman. She was black, and had braided red extensions in her hair. I noticed a nervous twitch, where occasionally when she blinked her eyes, she would blink them harder than was necessary.
After a few hours of silently watching a marathon of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, we were served our first meal: turkey sandwiches. I unwrapped the sandwich and put the packet of mayo to the side.
“You gonna use that mayo?” my co-inmate asked me. It was the first thing either one of us had said to the other.
“No, here.” I walked up to her and handed her the mayo. I thought black people were notorious for hating mayo, I thought. My black friend Travis was always saying, “White people like mayo. Brothers don’t fuck with that shit.”
As if she were reading my mind, the next thing out of her mouth was “I must be the only black bitch who eat mayo. Whachu in here for?”