Insatiable: Porn — A Love Story

by Asa Akira

  “No way. I just remember making nachos . . . then we went to bed!” Hank would smile while he said this, knowing in the back of his mind what we had done.

  “Not only did you leave open cans of beans everywhere, Akira, there are four spoons in the dishwasher covered in peanut butter.”

  Guilty. Around that time, I was carrying a jar of peanut butter with me everywhere I went. It was before my metabolism turned on me, when I could do things like order a whole pizza just for myself without thinking about how it would affect my love handles. If only I had known then what the future had in store for me; I would have spent all my time eating high-carb foods, instead of doing drugs and having sex.

  I don’t recall exactly when the three of us became a couple, or how it was initiated. It was in my OxyContin phase, so the timeline is a bit blurred. It’s hard to make out whether we had all fucked first, or if I fucked Hank alone first, or if they had started calling me their girlfriend before anyone had sex. The latter sounds about accurate; I believe they had started calling me their “girlfriend” as a joke, and reality just gradually started to imitate that.

  Before I paint a picture of some freaky, year-long sexual experiment, I should mention that Hank and Laura weren’t swingers. I try not to judge, but it would be a lie to say swingers aren’t weird fucking people. They have an air of desperateness to them that I can’t quite get with. The one time I went to a swingers party was by accident; my date had told me we were going to a party, and I was there for over an hour before I realized exactly what kind of party it was. “Are you okay?” he kept asking me, and I had no idea why—until, that is, some vaguely recognizable child actor of the eighties and his wife came swimming up to me, rolling on Ecstasy and talking about the girl they fucked last night.

  Sex was probably about the third-biggest factor in the relationship of Hank, Laura, and myself. Looking back, the dynamic was certainly strange. I was in love with both of them. We didn’t necessarily fuck every night. Sometimes I would sleep in bed with them; sometimes I would sleep alone. If one was out of town, I’d sleep in bed with the other. There were mornings I’d be in bed with Hank, and the sixteen-year-old daughter, Brynn, would come in and join us for a morning chat in the bedroom. It was more normal than it sounds.

  Often at night, I’d sneak into the master bedroom for some fun, after the kids went to sleep. We’d fuck like animals, and then sit around and talk for hours. Hank and I would always be pilled up by then, but Laura hardly partied. Hank would take out his guitar and play his favorite Elvis song as Laura and I lay cuddling.

  I became extremely close with Brynn. During the day, Hank would go to work. Sometimes I had to go with him, but for the majority of the week I was free during the day. Laura always had house stuff to do; she was endlessly busy. It was during that time I realized no job is busier than that of a mom. There’s always something to be done, and a never-ending list of errands, and when you get home, you’re still working. It should be a paying gig.

  “Akira! Come to the main house!” Brynn would yell into the guesthouse. I’d come downstairs, outside, we’d walk across the pool, and into the main house. Bri wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend yet, but we’d talk about the boys she liked. She would get home from school right around the time I woke up, and we’d then go to the mall, watch TV, do each other’s makeup, swim in the pool . . . regular teenager stuff. I was playing a sixteen-year-old by day, sisterwife by night.

  Hank always boasted that he had never fought with Laura, and she supported this statement. In the time I spent with them, I never saw them get upset with each other. It wasn’t like they bottled their feelings up, or internalized any anger—they simply didn’t disagree on much, and if they did, they were genuinely okay with agreeing to disagree. I still haven’t figured out if it’s the healthiest or unhealthiest thing I’ve ever seen.

  “I have a big announcement,” Hank slurred to us one night after we had attended a birthday party. Already a few pills in, we were all feeling good—even Laura, since her mom was staying the night with the baby. “Meet in the hot tub in ten minutes.”

  Laura and I giggled as we watched Hank come in and out of the kitchen, collecting candles and such from all around the house for our “meeting.”

  Once in the hot tub, Laura and I pawed at each other’s bodies.

  “Sit still for one second, guys, so I can make my announcement.”

  “There’s actually an announcement?” I laughed. I thought he was just saying that to get us all in the hot tub.

  “The floor is all yours,” Laura said, and winked at me as she sat back into another nook in the tub.

  With his eyes closed and his hands up like an orchestra conductor, he declared, “Here’s my announcement. I love you guys.”

  Pause.

  “That’s it?” Laura burst out laughing.

  Without trying to hide his disappointment, Hank came to sit between us, and put his arms around us. “I mean it, you guys. I’m not joking. I swear, I love you both.”

  He was nearing tears. The pills do that sometimes, escalate emotions. And it’s contagious. It was spreading to me, too, fast.

  “Wait, wait. I love you, too. Both of you. I’m so happy to be with you guys.” Now I started to cry. I was now officially a passenger on this emotional roller coaster. I started thinking about my life, and how I ended up here, in this strange ménage à trois. It wasn’t conventional, but it worked. I was happy. I felt close to them, and a part of something.

  “I think my babysitter raped me when I was young,” I started confessing.

  I had never said these words out loud before. “I have no real reason to think it, and no way to prove it.”

  Laura swam over to the other side of me, and ran her fingers through my wet hair.

  “I had a male babysitter when I was two or three. I slept in a toddler bed, and I remember we had this joke, where he’d crawl into my bed with me. I thought it was the funniest fucking thing, a grown-ass man in my toddler bed.”

  Hank held my hand.

  “I loved him. Then one day, he was just gone. I asked my parents where he went, and my mom just told me, ‘Just because we don’t like him anymore, it doesn’t mean you can’t like him.’ That’s a weird fucking answer, right? Even back then it felt cryptic and weird.”

  Hank was crying with me. Laura was holding me.

  “This sounds so fucking cliché and I hate it, but the worst part is—I’m pretty sure I fucking liked it! When I think of him, nothing but positive feelings come up. I don’t feel scared, or resentful; If anything, it makes me smile.”

  I looked up through my tears at both of them. They were hanging on to me, tightly.

  “No one has ever shown me love like this before.” It probably wasn’t the truth, but it felt like the right kind of moment to say something like this. “I’m so grateful to have you in my life.” That part was undoubtedly true.

  We sat there in the hot tub, the three of us crying, for what seemed in OxyContin-time like hours. I felt so emotionally charged, saying these words I had never been able to say out loud before. Naked, crying, talking about my suspicion of a childhood rape that I had no valid reason to back it up with, I was in the most vulnerable state a person could be in.

  Hank looked me in the eyes.

  “We love you, Akira.”

  Shit Pornstars Say

  “Don’t cum in my eye.”

  Whatever context it’s said in—whether it be a joke, threat, or gentle warning—this phrase is a curse. The moment these words are uttered, you’ve just guaranteed yourself sperm in your eyeball.

  Sometimes it’s the male performer. He does it on purpose; he’s having a bad day, he woke up to his girlfriend yelling at him, he hits traffic on the way to the set, and finally, upon getting out of the car after an hour and a half, he finds out he is working with a girl he has no chemistry with. The girl gives him a list of a million things he cannot do to her, starting with “don’t touch my hair,” and ending with �
��don’t cum in my eye.” He struggles through the scene, needing to cut every few minutes to get his dick back up. Finally, when the director gives him the nod, signaling him to cum, he projects his rage into his pop shot, and bam. “Accidentally” cums right on her cornea.

  More often, though, the male talent has little control of exactly where his pop goes. “Face” is a pretty general area, and the eyes are a big part of said area. It happens.

  “Where are the baby wipes?”

  What the baby wipe industry doesn’t know (or do they?) is that mothers of newborns are not the ones keeping them in business. It’s sluts. It’s whores. It’s pornstars. In porn, we use baby wipes for everything.

  Pee. “Where are the baby wipes?” Dirty feet. “Where are the baby wipes?” Dusty furniture. “Where are the baby wipes?” It’s hot in here. “Where are the baby wipes?” (Apply cold baby wipe to nape of neck.)

  Whenever I’m on a non-porno set, like say a music video, or an independent movie, I have to constantly remind myself not to ask for baby wipes. It’s like a huge neon sign with an arrow pointing down to me, saying in all caps, “SEX WORKER.”

  If a girl has baby wipes in her house, but no baby—I’d say she will most likely be down to let you put it in her ass.

  “I have to clean my ass.”

  It seems like a big portion of my life is spent cleaning my ass.

  “I can’t go out tonight, I have to clean my ass.” Or “Let me call you right back—I’m cleaning my ass.”

  Of course, everyone has their own system, but I like to prep for my anal scene a day in advance. I wake up in the morning, work out, then start the process. The sooner in the day I can do it, the better.

  The process is simple. I take an enema bag, fill it up with water, feed it into my ass through a tube, let it out, repeat.

  I get paid almost a thousand dollars extra when a scene entails anal, as opposed to just vaginal. When I first started shooting anal scenes, it didn’t seem fair . . . a hole is a hole, and one isn’t worth much more than the other.

  But as I sit here, refilling the enema bag over and over while browsing the Internet, I realize . . . They’re not paying me extra ’cause it’s my asshole. The extra grand is for the prep that goes into it.

  “I have cancer.”

  Beautiful, with the kind of face that comes by porn no more than once every few years, Raven joined Spiegler’s roster of girls a couple of years after myself. Seemingly normal, there was nothing offensive about her—a country girl, with two little kids and a steady boyfriend.

  Less than a year after she signed with Spiegler, she announced she had cancer. It’s completely horrible, but my first instinct was:

  “It’s a lie.”

  I expressed my thoughts to Spiegler and Dana, and they agreed with me. Cancer was a common subject when it came to liars in porn, and the business was full of them. Someone ought to do a research on women in porn—we have an astounding amount of pathological liars being exposed every day. So six months later, when Raven started to post pictures online of her bald self wig-shopping, we all felt bad. I called Spiegler telling him not to tell anyone what I had said.

  Months went by, and Raven got worse. People who had seen her said she had dropped a dramatic amount of weight, and her skin had gotten grayish. Her boyfriend tweeted the progress of her disease, stating Raven had gotten too sick to respond to her fans on the site. Eventually, she became too weak to walk and needed to be physically carried in and out of her wheelchair when leaving her home. Which was ironic, because after her boyfriend quit his job to take care of her two children, Raven made money by webcamming with fans, and escorting.

  Almost a year went by, when Raven switched to an all-vegan diet and started drinking alkaline water, and suddenly, miraculously, was cured. Her doctors informed her that her body was free of cancer. Around this time, someone on Twitter asked her why, if she had lost all the hair on her head, did she still have eyebrows. A few days later, she posted a picture of herself with no eyebrows.

  Just as suddenly as she was cured, her boyfriend left her, deleted all of the cancer-related tweets, and posted a final tweet, that his girlfriend was a liar.

  “Do you think . . . ?” I carefully, yet excitedly questioned Dana.

  “We called that shit first,” Dana said, smiling.

  10

  No Sex in the Champagne Room

  “Assume the position, ma’am.”

  Pause.

  “And I use the word assume, because I assume—”

  Pause.

  “—that you’ve been in this position before.”

  The crowd of two-hundred-plus horny ladies went wild.

  This was my first encounter at a male stripclub. My thoughts on such a place had always been simple: Male strippers are gross.

  We were there for Anita’s birthday. My friend Ellie’s cousin’s ex-husband owned the club, so she had hooked it up for us. We thought the experience would be fun in a totally ironic way—like, “Ha-ha, look at these Fabio dudes dancing! What losers!”

  We were wrong. These men were hot as fuck.

  Onstage, “Nico”—dressed in stripper police gear, complete with Ray-Ban sunglasses and an artificial-hormone-fed figure—was standing behind a woman he had bent over the chair. Laughing, blushing from a combination of embarrassment and drunkenness, the woman would be somebody’s wife tomorrow. Tonight, though, her girlfriends had signed her up to simulate sex acts onstage with a man wearing a thong under his cop uniform.

  As the theme from the show Cops played, Nico tore his uniform off and danced around the stage. The crowd cheered on as he did backflips in nothing but shoes and a small piece of cloth covering his dick and asshole. A frumpy woman, presumably an employee, came onstage to escort the bachelorette off as more Nico-looking men, only dressed in tearaway prison outfits, joined in on the act.

  Ellie had gotten us a booth right up front, so we could enjoy the show with the best view in the house. But the real show was behind us.

  Women yelling, banging on the tables, jumping up and down on the chairs. Out of context, you would have thought we were monkeys in a zoo at feeding time.

  If I were a man working at this club, I would be terrified of women.

  I mean we were frightening.

  The show had opened with six shirtless men dancing to 50 Cent’s “In da Club.” The lights beamed off their oiled muscles, making the women scream so loud I thought it was a tape recording to get the crowd going. I had never heard noises like that in my life.

  I was screaming, too.

  Some of them danced better than me. Scratch that. All of them danced better than me. A couple of them even did pole tricks, which I don’t do at all. I wondered how much they make. Had any of them done gay porn? I wondered if they were all just flaming homosexuals outside of this club. These men were too aesthetically pleasing to be straight. Gay retail clerk by day, women’s sex object by night? Straight for pay?

  A few men, for their solo shows, danced to the same songs I used to dance to when I was stripping. I wonder if the same things ran through their heads while they dance. Why am I here? How many more minutes until my shift is over? Did they hate this job as much as I had?

  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy dancing. It’s not even that I didn’t enjoy the men I was dancing for. In fact, once I was onstage, once I was interacting with the crowd, once I was giving lapdances, I enjoyed myself. It’s the late hours, the dirty clubs, the million cigarettes I ended up smoking in the dressing room . . . Too tired to do anything during the day, not wanting to eat too much before going naked in front of hundreds of men . . . Unrolling the filthy dollar bills thrown at me before finally washing all the grime off my body in the shower at 5 a.m.

  My saving grace was Maury, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sugar daddy. I had been dancing for a few months at the Hustler Club, and Maury was a known big spender.

  “If he likes you, he’ll take you to the champagne room every night. You don’
t even have to be dirty.” The host winked. He took my hand and walked me over to an elevated VIP table.

  “Come sit with us!” Maury shouted over the music. There were already a good five or six girls sitting with him, all laughing, all beautiful. It seemed almost cartoonish, these long-legged, Jessica Rabbit–looking women surrounding this fat, gray-haired Jewish man. They had the desperateness of wanting cash written across their faces, but they all seemed to be familiar with and even to enjoy Maury’s company. The Hustler Club in New York City is somewhat different from the average titty bar across Middle America; it’s a “gentleman’s lounge,” a whole other breed of stripclubs. The ceilings are high, there are three stages, and the seats are clean, free of holes and stains. There’s a cigar lounge upstairs on the roof, which is lit by tea lights and looks out over the Hudson River. The women are dressed in long gowns instead of bikinis, and one-dollar bills are not crumpled up and thrown onstage. Money is made not on the stage, but in private dances, and mostly in the Champagne Room.

  “Hi, Maury. I’ve heard so many good things about you from all of the girls. I’m Akira.” That was the stage name I used back then.

  We had some small talk before he eventually signaled the host back over, telling him he wanted to take me to the Champagne Room. At the words “Champagne Room,” the energy of the group shifted. Every girl sitting with us sat up a little taller, paid attention a little closer.

  “I’m gonna go with Akira tonight,” he said as each face fell.

  Maury paid the host with cash. Four hundred dollars for the club, the “hourly room fee,” and an additional six hundred dollars for me.

  Once we were alone in the room, I didn’t know what to expect. Some guys, I had to hint at a blowjob to get in here. Of course, once we got into the room, I would spend the next hour putting off the promised oral sex, instead just giving a lapdance that lasted too long for both of us. With some guys, I turned into their therapist; they’d complain to me about their wives, girlfriends, mistresses, and I just became a helping ear. Some guys just wanted company while they snorted coke for an hour, cutting their lines with their corporate credit cards.