by Asa Akira
“Yah,” he answered. “The old ones are at the bottom, the new ones are at the top.”
It’s hard to talk about the Spiegler Girls without sounding like a cult. There’s twenty-five of us in total, and we are the most hardcore girls in the industry. Ask anyone. Most porn agencies represent 100–150 girls each, but not Spiegler. He never exceeds his limit of twenty-five, and there’s always a waiting list. Often referred to as the “Ari Emanuel of Porn,” he only takes the cream of the crop. We aren’t the blond girls with all-fake-everything who don’t kiss on the mouth. You need a girl who does everything, and does it well, you call Spiegler.
Toni and I arrived just in time to overhear Spiegler yelling something about “Miscarriage Soup” in the living room.
“Are you guys talking about Vicky again?” I guessed as I walked in.
“Yah, Donna didn’t know she had another abortion,” Spiegler said, laughing from across the room. There is no limit to what is appropriate for conversation with him. Once information is sent out into the universe, anything is fair game.
I eagerly joined. “You’d think the girl would learn to stop letting dudes nut in her!”
Toni shook his head. The long afternoon of shit talking had begun. At home, Toni was the boss. But here, with the rest of the Spiegler Girls, this was my world.
Once we sat down to eat, the conversation didn’t get any more holiday-friendly.
“Is the stuffing vegan?” Pamela asked.
“Only if being in a turkey’s vagina for three hours is considered vegan,” Kelly smiled.
“Try this creamed corn,” Courtney said as she passed me a paper plate.
“Ahhh, I never get to eat corn.” It was true. Corn doesn’t digest in an aesthetically pleasing way. “Good thing none of us are shooting anal tomorrow,” I joked.
“Jasmine is!” Four girls chimed in unison, and everyone pointed at Jasmine and laughed.
Jasmine had just started shooting anal scenes two months ago. For a Spiegler Girl, she had waited an awfully long time. Starting anal is a very specific tactic in porn. It’s a weapon, and you need to pull it out at the exact right moment. You don’t want to start off doing anal right out the gate; being new, if you’re a good performer, everyone’s going to take notice of you anyway. You don’t want to wait too long, either, though—once you are off the “hot list,” you’re off of it for good. It won’t matter if you start getting fucked in the ass by elephants; no one is going to care.
The magic moment is when you are at the height of your career. You’ve probably been in the industry about a year or two, and the buzz around you is going strong. You were nominated for Best New Starlet last year for all the awards shows. All the big companies have already shot you a few times, but no one is sick of you yet.
That’s when you play the anal card.
You’re already at the top, and starting anal scenes will extend your time there. After a year or so of that, you start DP (double penetration). And then gangbangs.
I swear, I could be a manager. I owe it all to Spiegler. He taught me everything I know about business.
In previous years, I had always gone home to New York City to spend the holiday with my parents, but this year I had a shoot the day before, and it wouldn’t have been worth it to fly back for just one day. My parents and I are close, but they, being traditionally Japanese, couldn’t care less about the actual meaning of Thanksgiving. It’s not fair to label them typical Japanese parents, though; relatively liberal, my father is a photographer, and my mom used to run a not-for-profit organization. They would rather me do something else with my life, something they could brag to their friends about, but in the end, they are happy I’m happy, and they accept what I choose to do for a living. Not going home for the holiday wasn’t a big deal.
Plus, I had that weird incident last year. Perhaps subconsciously, I was holding a grudge against Thanksgiving itself.
Spiegler loves telling my Thanksgiving molestation story, and this day was no exception.
“She’s talking about rape this and rape that all the time, and when it finally happens, she drops the ball!” No topic was off-limits when it came to a Spiegler joke.
“She like-a-da rape,” Jess added.
It’s a running joke that I have a rape fantasy. Don’t get me wrong, I love rough sex. I love a guy who can dominate me, make me push my comfort zones, and give me a light beating as I orgasm. But rape? No. I don’t even like sitting next to strangers on the subway.
“I don’t have a rape fantasy! It’s not a fucking rape fantasy if the rapist is a hot dude who cuddles with me after! You have so much to learn, Baby Jessie.” I threw a piece of cornbread at her as she laughed.
At nineteen, Jessie was the youngest of all of us, hence the nickname. I try not to think too much about the fact that I sometimes get paid to have sex with girls born in the nineties. It never really occurs to me as strange, until she questions my casual My Girl reference, and in response to my obvious answer, “You know, the Macaulay Culkin movie,” she looks even more puzzled.
On the other side of the spectrum, at thirty-six, Dana was the oldest of us. She’s also been with Spiegler the longest. I like to think she is the head of our sorority, and she is in an eternal state of hazing everyone around her. After a certain amount of time in porn, you earn the right to be a self-righteous, egotistical bitch. By default, there’s an ironic humor to it; we are shunned by pretty much every group of society. Without the self-deprecating-yet-condescending attitude, you’ll never make it. We’re a lot like she-males in that way.
We had finished our turkey and somehow went from a debate about rape fantasies to Spiegler retelling the story of how he trained his cat to flush the toilet, when Chris decided to announce he invited his girlfriend over. Chris is a photographer, who’s been in the business even longer than Spiegler. Living in the same building as each other, it only made sense he would stop by our orphans’ feast.
“Who’s your girlfriend?” Dana demanded.
“You guys are gonna love her. She’s bringing a few of her stripper friends over.” Chris took out his phone to find a picture of this supposed girlfriend.
“Strippers?” Laila exclaimed. “Ew.”
“Why is she bringing strippers?” I asked.
“She’s a dancer. So are her friends.” Chris was getting annoyed at our obvious judgment. “Watch this, she’s always goofin’ around her house.” He started to show us a video on his phone.
“Strippers are gross,” Veronica stated, ignoring the video with the rest of us.
“What, are they all gonna come dance for us?” Laila sneered, stink-face in full effect.
“Yah. Just like you’re all gonna gape your fuckin’ assholes. For them.” No one could get us off our high horses quite like Spiegler. I’d call him a pessimist, but he’d probably just turn around and tell me he’s a realist.
We couldn’t stop laughing. We were talking about strippers like they were Nazis or serial killers. They took their clothes off for a living. From the point of view of pretty much anyone on earth, we ourselves did much, much worse.
“I just hope they’re not intimidated by me,” Dana sighed.
Spiegler smiled as he watched us laugh. “Who wants pie? Let’s eat it before the strippers get here.”
Haiku
Rub-bing on my clit
Right when I’m about to cum;
Huge cramp in my leg.
14
Craigslist
It was seven years since we dated. At four years, he was my longest relationship.
“Kevin’s DEAD!” Dee screamed into the phone. A few years after we had broken up, the two of them had started dating. Dee was my best friend since we were thirteen, and honestly, the two of them were more compatible than Kevin and I had been.
“What?”
“He’s fucking dead!” Dee hysterically screamed again, and hung up. I was in my towel, my hair dripping water all over the floor of my apartment in L.A. Rushi
ng as usual, I was scheduled to shoot an anal scene with Mandingo that day. I called her back but her phone went to voice mail. I dialed Jules’s number, one of the few numbers I knew by memory from back before cellphones.
“Is it true?”
I immediately knew it was when I heard Jules crying. In the eleven years I had known him, I had never heard him cry.
“Yo, Asa,” was all he could get out.
I sat down on my sofa. Everything felt far away, like I was in an underwater bubble and the rest of the ocean was spinning around me in fast-forward. It couldn’t be true. Kevin was the one who was supposed to make it, out of all of us. He was the only one who had actually given any consideration to his future, attending business school instead of going to art school or a party school in Miami, or even skipping college altogether, like the rest of us. When everyone else was fighting, Kevin was the one who kept us together. He was the heart of the group.
“They found him in a hotel room this morning. He OD’d.” Jules was the closest to him. They had known each other years before Kevin and I had started dating.
“On what?” As I said the words, I realized I didn’t want to hear it. “I’ll call you back,” I said as I was already hanging up.
It’s weird what the mind does when you’re in shock. Mine took me back to a sunny afternoon in highschool.
“I have an idea. Just go to the living room until I call you back in.” Kevin and I had played hooky from school as usual. We were lucky this particular day, as no one was home; meaning we didn’t have to find somewhere outside to waste time until 3 p.m., the time we were supposed to get out of school.
I left the room and waited. Kevin’s apartment was weird. I didn’t know the term back then, but I now realize his dad was a hoarder. He had old shit covering the entire place. I’d call them antiques, but I doubt they were the kind of old things that held any value. Old clocks, toys, and random mechanical parts hung on every square inch of the wall. Even the ceiling fan was old. Walking from point A to point B in a straight line was an impossibility; every foot or so you’d have to turn your body sideways to squeeze in between two or more random items, be it an ancient pinball machine, or an inconveniently placed overflowing bookshelf. The only room in the apartment looking relatively normal was Kevin’s room.
“Come in!” Kevin yelled.
I walked back into his room and found him standing, facing the door, the sheet of his bed draped on him, covering him head to toe like a ghost. It was a blue sheet, patterned with tons of little cowboys riding horses.
“What are you doing?” I giggled.
“Don’t you notice anything?” Kevin muffled from under the sheet, laughing.
I looked down and realized he had cut a slit in the fabric, and his dick was hanging out, hard. I hadn’t noticed, because of the busy pattern. Shaking with laughter, I walked toward him.
“Blow me.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I want you to blow me.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Yah.”
So I got on all fours on the bed and blew.
The next day, when we snuck out of school again to go to his apartment, we sat on his bed to realize his stepmom had sewn the hole shut.
I was Kevin’s first girlfriend. I took his virginity, but his friends didn’t know that. He was about the tenth guy I had slept with, but it was with him that I really explored my sexuality for the first time. As teenagers in New York City, we had to be creative; most New York apartments are small and not ideal for sex while parents are home. We’d go to the stairwell, the roof, even the elevator to fuck. We’d skip school and take the train for an hour and a half to his dad’s country house upstate just so we could smoke weed and fuck all day. I wasn’t allowed to sleep over at his apartment, but a few nights a week he’d sneak me in after everyone was asleep. We’d have silent sex, and I’d pee in Gatorade bottles throughout the night.
A year before his death, Dee called me in a panic. “Remember Rosie?”
Of course I remembered Rosie. Kevin hung out with her a few times when we had taken a monthlong break from our relationship in my senior year. He swore up and down all they did was kiss, once at the pizza place.
“She blew him. He just told me not to tell you but how can I not?”
It had been almost ten years since we were together.
“What? Are you fucking joking right now? Tell me everything.”
“He went out to get Phillies so I have to be quick. Remember he told us about the pizza place, how they kissed? Well, apparently they came back here and she fucking blew him! Asa, I’m so mad at him I can’t even look at his face. But he made me promise not to tell you.”
“That motherfucker! And that stupid bitch! I’m gonna scream!”
“That’s what I said! But you can’t tell him you know or he’ll kill me.”
“I’m not gonna say anything. I don’t even care. I think. I don’t know. That stupid cunt. Just be mean to him today for me.”
“Um, duh. He’s going to be paying for this for a long time.”
I always thought a day would come where I could confront him about Rosie. And we’d have a laugh about it.
I didn’t go to the funeral. I bought a ticket to fly into the city, but the morning of the flight I stayed in bed. A part of me felt he wouldn’t want me there. We hadn’t gotten along for the past few years. He had started dating Dee two years prior, so we’d see each other often, but only communicated when necessary. He resented me for doing porn. He resented me even before that, when I was stripping.
“I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate you,” he told me in one of the last phone conversations we had.
I lay in bed, watching the time pass by as I missed the flight, and reminisced about one winter evening in my junior year of highschool. My part-time job at the children’s bookstore was okay, but I needed more cash to buy things like weed and purses. At least, that’s what I told Kevin. He saw right through me.
“How do you not have enough money? Your parents give you an allowance and I pay for everything anyway.”
“I don’t want you to pay for everything! And my allowance is fucking twenty dollars a day; that’s barely enough to eat! How can you not get it??” I turned around in the swivel chair and pouted. Pushing against his desk with my hand, I started to spin around and around in circles. I would get my way.
For as long as I can remember, I always felt like I didn’t have enough money. Throughout my childhood, my parents had been rich and poor many times. They always sent me to an elite private school, but I was never as rich as the other kids in school. There were years we lived in expensive doorman buildings in SoHo and West Village, but there were also years we lived above a bodega in Brooklyn off a stop on the G train. At nineteen, during the height of my family’s brokeness, I married a sports bookie who offered me five thousand dollars a month as an allowance, just for spending; my food, mortgage, and expenses would already be covered. I felt mortified that someone could think I could enjoy life on that little. In the end I got a ten-thousand-dollar allowance.
My views on money have always been confused.
“Asa, that job sounds shady as fuck. I’m sorry I don’t want my girlfriend giving random motherfuckers handjobs!”
I had been strolling Craigslist for days. That’s what “looking for a job” meant to me; sitting at my boyfriend’s computer in my pajamas at 7 p.m., smoking a blunt, watching The Simpsons, and periodically hitting the “refresh” button on Craigslist.
The ad read:
Massage therapist needed. No experience necessary, will train. Make your own schedule! Make up to 600 dollars a day call two one two five zero five nine two seven five.
I knew exactly what this job was about. I convinced myself that I didn’t. I played dumb with Kevin. I brought the spinning chair to a halt.
“I would never fucking do that, you know that! Why would you even go there?
Just let me check it out. It’s a legitimate massage therapy job. Maybe this is what I want to do after I graduate.”
Eventually I persuaded Kevin to come with me to the job interview. He was mad, but I knew he’d get over it. This wasn’t the first time I demanded to do something he disagreed with. Just a few months ago, I met a man in the subway who offered me a gig as an “import model.” You know, the girls who stand in bikinis next to cars at trade shows. The man knew I was young, but once I told him I had a fake ID, he assured me “that should work just fine.” When I got to the initial photo shoot, it was at the man’s apartment in the projects. I did two sets of photos, one in a bikini, one in a dress, all while hoping the whole time I wouldn’t get raped. After I left, I never picked up the man’s calls again.
Once we got to the midtown address given to me over the phone, Kevin waited outside. Although the building was beautiful, it was definitely residential, which didn’t support my case of “This is a legitimate massage therapy job.” I could see Kevin grilling me down through the glass door of the lobby as I walked into the elevator. I pretended not to notice.
Upstairs, a man in a silky black robe opened the door. He was some kind of dark Asian—Thai, Filipino, something like that. He was probably in his mid-forties. Immediately, I got creeped out.
“Welcome,” he said, as he smiled and extended his hand. I took it. It was eerily soft.
“Hi.” I looked around, and everything was either gold or mirrored. There was a flute hanging from a random corner in the ceiling, the significance of which I immediately grasped; a few years back, my mother had flown in a woman from Thailand to redecorate our entire house according to the laws of fen shui. We had flutes, tiny mirrors, fish, dragons, strategically hanging all over our walls. It’s still embarrassing to explain when I take someone back home: Oh, the trashcan is awkwardly right smack in the middle of the kitchen because obviously, the way they built this place, any of the corners, or against a wall would be bad luck. And try not to knock over the cups of salt inconveniently placed throughout the house. Don’t mind the sheet we put over the mirror in the bedroom when we go to sleep, either, but it’s inauspicious to go to bed facing a mirror.