Pornstar

by Ian Gittler

  THE QUEEN OF THE GUTTERSLUTS

  SHE FUCKS, SHE SUCKS AND SWALLOWS WITH THE BEST OF THEM.

  DEBI, YOU ARE A FUCKING SLUT!

  The last time I spoke to her, before discovering that her pager and voice mail were disconnected, I read Debi my description of the first scene I watched her perform—I guess to be up front with her about the way I saw things, my take on it. She listened closely. It was the scene with the wax, the broken string of fake pearls dangling from her neck, the guys and their erection problems, Debi’s demanding Marc to bang her head against the wall.

  Debi was silent for a long few seconds after I stopped.

  “Those were my grandmother’s pearls,” she finally said, “and they weren’t fake.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  I CALL BILL MARGOLD, A BURLY TEDDY BEAR OF A MAN WHO HAS TRIED HIS HAND AT every job in the business at one point or another in the course of his twenty-plus years in porn. He doesn’t miss a beat, kicking into gear the second he answers his telephone. The sound bites start flying.

  “I wrote the line ‘He Brought Them to Their Knees, But Not to Pray,’” he crows. “That’s one of the greats.”

  Margold is at home in the Valley on a Sunday afternoon, watching football. He mentions his toll-free porn-star support line, and that’s when I bring up April Rayne, ask him why no one talks about her death. Margold gets annoyed. “Because it never happened,” he says, and demands that I show him some proof if it did. He goes so far as to say that since he never heard about it, it couldn’t have happened. So I call Tom Byron, the guy who told me in the first place, right after Savannah killed herself.

  “Yeah,” Tom says, like it’s no biggie. “That wasn’t true after all. Andrea’s alive.”

  I ask for her number.

  “Man, I had it,” Tom says, “but I lost it. I think I threw it out by accident. When she gave it to me I was in a hotel. I think she lives in Sacramento.”

  Sacramento directory assistance has two numbers with Andrea’s last name. The first one’s been disconnected, the second one has changed. I dial the new number. A machine answers. It’s an unfamiliar voice, but at the end of the outgoing message, the woman says,”. . . and if you want to reach Andrea dial.”

  It’s four years since our last conversation—and she spent two of them dead. But Andrea, the former April Rayne, answers her telephone.

  “Hey! Wow, it’s so great to hear from you. That’s so cool you found me. I was just thinking about you. I moved and I was hanging the pictures you took of me.”

  Andrea says she’s in business school and that she’s already doing some part-time accounting work. She also reluctantly admits, “Sometimes I’ll do a bachelor party for extra cash,” in a tone that says, “but we won’t discuss that now.”

  “Hey, wasn’t that rumor fucking strange?” she says. “Once I was in LA for a week and I ran into a girl I knew from when I was in the business. It was in a hair salon. She almost had a heart attack.”

  Andrea is upbeat, like even this conversation brings her back to a part of her life she’s left behind, a part filled with charged memories and not all bad ones. Wherever she is, it’s noisy, like a train station or bar. Then Andrea’s voice starts to drop out.

  “Sorry about the bad connection,” she says. “I’m on my cell phone, and anyway, this place is really loud.”

  I ask where she is.

  “Discovery Zone,” Andrea says. “You know, it’s a big indoor playground. My son loves it here. I’m a mom now. Listen, I’ll call you in a couple of days and tell you every-thing, OK? Things are a little crazy here.”

  TWO DAYS LATER. Andrea says she had an affair. The guy would beat her, “severely,” and eventually she said, “no fucking more.” After they split up he moved back to his native Italy. Right about that time Andrea realized she was pregnant. She never told him, never tried to contact him. Instead, she went home to Sacramento, moved back in with her mom, gave birth to her son, and became a mom herself.

  Andrea is into it. She doesn’t ever allude to the universal headaches, nothing, not one complaint about the whole radical-life-change thing that occurs when you have a child, what some parents use as a way of qualifying their joy, like, “Well, my life is all about the baby now, but I love it.”

  Nothing of the kind from Andrea. It’s troubling.

  Because as excited as she is about being a mom, it’s nothing compared with how she sounds when she reminisces about the “old days.”

  “It was so fucking wild,” she gushes.

  Andrea says she shot up fifty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin—basically every-thing she’d saved while doing porn. At one point her habit was $1,500 a day. She says she quickly resorted to streetwalking.

  “But I was fucking shocked to find Jeanna Fine on Sepulveda. We both ended up in the same junkie-hooker hotel. I can’t remember what it’s called, but I bet I still have a book of matches. I save everything. Anyway, we were all there for the same reason.”

  Andrea pauses, lingering on the memory like it’s a picture in a photo album. “That was so weird. I mean I knew she was using—that was our thing. But you know, she was a big star. I guess that’s what girls do, ones who can.

  “So in the middle of all this is Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me, which was so wild. Did you know I went to Cannes? I was a junkie with nowhere to live, but I would get these messages, y’know, like sometimes from my mom, if someone could find her: ‘Tell Andrea Interview magazine wants to shoot her.’ A lot of stuff like that. It was really great.”

  Andrea is psyched to hear that someone saw Robert Risko’s illustration of her in The New Yorker, and the story about her in Interview.

  “You saw the drawing?” she says. “I heard about that but I never saw it. That’s so cool.” Jeanna Fine later confirms that, yes, she was a junkie and, yes, she did end up in the same hotel as Andrea. But she denies ever streetwalking; then, unable to resist, Jeanna boldly states for the record: “No matter how bad things got, I was still a star. Jeanna Fine always commanded top dollar just to walk through the door.”

  Fine, emerging from her latest retirement clean, sober, and looking glamorous, won two trophies in Las Vegas. She’s married—in what she calls a healthy relationship—and she’s a mother now. Fine says her life is normal, that she’s done a “complete 360.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER Andrea calls again.

  “Guess what! I called up Tommy Byron and he said he wants me to star in a video he’s directing . .. isn’t that wild?! It’s gonna be my comeback.”

  She says it like she’s expecting me to congratulate her. It does sound wild, out of control. Andrea is so into doing this.

  “My boyfriend is cool about it,” she says. “He definitely wants to watch, and maybe even do a scene with me. He’s not jealous at all. He wants to watch me get fucked.”

  I ask if she’s always stayed in touch with Byron.

  “Not always, but Tommy is definitely my number-one favorite ‘Anal Intruder’ of all time.” Andrea makes a noise that incorporates a shiver, or a shudder, like just the thought of getting butt-banged on a set in the Valley makes her hotter than she’s felt in a long time. Then she laughs.

  I tell her I want to interview her after she does it, maybe right after.

  “Totally,” she says. “I’ll know the details in a couple of weeks.”

  Then I say she should really give it some thought before she goes through with it, especially now that there’s a kid involved.

  “Don’t worry, I will. It’s gonna be fucking great.”

  JON DOUGH.

  “Hey, man! How are you?” he says.

  Encomium, the Led Zeppelin tribute album, blasts away in the background. He turns it off. I ask him about his stereo.

  “It’s a big one, Ian.”

  Jon says he finally signed his contract with Vivid Video.

  I called to find out about his family, about his childhood, his mom. It’s 9:30 his time, in LA. Saturday morning. Jon sighs and doesn�
��t say anything for a few seconds.

  Finally it’s, “Oh, man. My mother?” then another long pause.

  “She’s still searching for happiness, never found it, just like all of us. She’s a dreamer.” There’s rustling, like maybe Jon lifts himself out of bed and resigns himself to dredging it all up.

  JON DOUGH

  “My father, he was gone with a new wife, kids, house by the time I was seven or eight. My mom and my grandma would talk bad about him, but I remember thinking, ‘Wow, a real house, a real family, that would be nice.’ I wanted what I saw over there.

  “So anyway, my mom has this black guy named Bobcat Jones move in with us. He was bad. Over time there were rapes in my house. My brother and I—he was seven and I was eight—we wanted to kill him. I mean, my brother was very loving, but with this guy real violence entered the picture. I think if there had been a gun in the house, Bobcat would’ve been dead right then.

  “My mom had a daughter when she was thirteen, put her up for adoption. So three years ago, through a service, my mom and her locate each other and we all get to meet. At the end of the evening, my new sister admits to Deirdre [porn star Deirdre Holland, Jon’s ex-wife] and me that she’s Deirdre’s biggest fan—like posters on her wall and everything. She tells us she’s a lesbian. Very strange. Anyway . . .

  “So my mom—I don’t know—Bobcat moves out. Pretty soon after that, a friend of hers, a black woman named Ann, moves in with us. By this time I’ve already been dumped in whoever’s lap would take me. Back and forth, back and forth. My mom and Ann drove me up to Bakersfield—they were gonna leave me with my mom’s stepfather.

  “I’m lying awake in the dark. I’m twelve at this point. So I’m listening to my mother and Ann talking. My mom was saying she was like the man in their relation-ship and so forth. That was when I first understood, or learned, that my mom was a lesbian.

  “It didn’t bother me,” he says.

  Jon describes the point in his childhood he remembers most fondly: He’d convinced his mom to let him come back and live with her in LA. He was thirteen.

  “My mom was still so young and so were her friends, all her lesbian friends. A lot of them were beautiful. They liked me. They were affectionate with me. They would stroke my hair and stuff like that. I loved it. I remember riding my bike over to one of my mom’s friend’s houses on my own, to hang out with those beautiful women. Then I would go home and masturbate thinking about them. I was so turned on by those ladies.”

  It’s crazy. The similarity between Jon’s life and mine at that age takes me by surprise, nearly flips me out. His story rolls over me like a wave, an epiphany. While Jon was hanging out with beautiful lesbians in California, I was in New York sunbathing with lithe cosmopolitans. My early adolescent summers were spent—mostly unsupervised—in a group rental on Fire Island. During the week I was the only one there. A steady stream of my mom’s and stepfather’s and the other renters’ friends—mostly sexy fashion and advertising types—made their way out to use the place. That meant constant, in-my-face, supercharged sexual stimuli, lots of attention—and the neediness that came with it—their neediness. It was way too much for a barely teenage boy to understand, or to insulate himself against.

  While other boys were learning how to ask girls out, learning some kind of acceptable—respectful—language for addressing the opposite sex—a language that might serve them throughout their lives—I was smoking pot in a Speedo suit, curly hair hanging down my back, surrounded by horny, naked Me Generation career women. My best T-shirt at the time was one that a record exec friend of my parents’ had given me. It was tight, white cotton with long sleeves, and it made my bony frame look even skinnier. Three lines in bold black letters across my chest said it all: IF IT AIN’T STIFF IT AIN’T WORTH A FUCK.

  Until now, Jon’s favorite summer had always been my favorite summer, too. I don’t know what it means, exactly, but at this moment I realize that my identifying with Jon is something deeper than I’d thought; that it has less to do with anything intellectual—like choice—and more to do with stuff that happened a long time ago, stuff that was out of our control. I’m thinking this guy had to be sexually abused—and for the first time it occurs to me that I may’ve been as well.

  I ask Jon if he ever had sex with any of them.

  “No. But what happened was enough.”

  I don’t believe the second part. Being so close, so stimulated, so intentionally stimulated and not consummating was intensely frustrating. Confusing, painful. I don’t buy it when he says it wasn’t.

  “Who knows, it might’ve killed the feeling if it really happened,” Jon says. “But God, I was so turned on. Those days, I was jerking off in my classroom at school—literally—through my pocket, and actually coming. Is that common? I always wondered if other guys did that.

  “So when I was fifteen, my mom sent me to live with another one of her relatives. He was this forty-five-year-old gay guy with money. I didn’t mind, because he bought me whatever I wanted and I had a really nice place to stay.

  “At night when I was falling asleep he would appear in the doorway of my bedroom. Man, he would become a woman.”

  “You mean the guy was in drag?” I ask.

  “No, man. He would become totally feminine.”

  Jon imitates the guy’s voice, sounding like a gentle woman.

  “He would sit on the edge of the bed and coo at me. He would say ‘I adore you.’ It was bizarre. We didn’t do anything, though.”

  Jon doesn’t want me—or anyone—to think there’s one gay molecule in him, that there’s any sexual ambiguity there whatsoever. I don’t buy that either; I don’t believe it’s true of anyone, much less Jon. Maybe for me it isn’t an issue. I fooled around with enough boys in high school and college to know I’m not gay. But as I listen to this part of Jon’s story, my cool, anything-goes attitude gives way to an unexpected burst of resentment—I can taste my outrage at a man so terrorizing a child. And suddenly I’m thinking about my first homosexual encounter, out on Fire Island with a man more than twice my age, and the experience takes on a hue of impropriety, of wrongness—I’m overcome with a feeling of having been wronged, or robbed of something. Used. It’s a familiar feeling, but one I’d never associated with this memory before.

  “So one night he actually gave me the ultimatum,” Jon says.” ‘Put out or get out.’ He told me nothing in life comes for free. So that was it for life in Sherman Oaks.

  “That’s when my mom sent me back to Pennsylvania to live with my real father. I was still fifteen. He was a cop in a small town. It was really tough. I was already set in my ways, real long hair. We would have fistfights. He would win, but I had heart.

  “I got a job at Kroger’s, the grocery store. I bought a Nova and souped it up. That’s when I started stealing cars, for joyrides and parts.”

  Jon is sure of himself when he tells his “bad kid” stories. Proud. He recounts reckless teenage escapades and says the other cops in his town would cut him slack because they knew his father would kill him if he ever found out.

  “One day I’m in Kroger’s and Bobcat Jones walks in. It was so weird,” Jon says. “I was scared. I’m like eighteen and I haven’t seen him since I was eight. But I looked at him. When I was a kid, he was this cut, buff black dude. Now he had quite a beer gut. He looked totally spent. It was sad. I’ll never forget it. We said hello. I said hello first. I don’t think he would’ve even recognized me. I remember feeling like he was gonna die. So after we said hello I went into the bathroom in the back of the store. I just sat there. And all of a sudden I forgave him. I forgave Bobcat. It was so weird. About six months later we found out he died.”

  Jon stops speaking. I’m overwhelmed, saddened. Angry.

  Jon’s dogs bark in the background. I try to imagine his house in Topanga Canyon. I feel close to him but also freaked out by it. I mean I always kind of knew it wasn’t just that we’re the same age or that I’m open-minded.

  I
think “There but for the grace of God go I”—or something absurd like that—about how lucky I am that all I ended up doing—besides years of reckless promiscuity—was following these feelings through by making a book.

  “How do you spell Kroger’s?” I say, all dumbed out.

  Jon laughs, and I’m relieved he’s OK.

  He continues, describing getting back to LA, getting deeper into the car stealing, into being bad, bad, bad: all the macho stuff. I can’t take it in. I’m still trying to absorb the childhood years. Both of ours.

  “Since I don’t do drugs anymore, I find that high somewhere else,” Jon says. “Every second of the day I have to fight some part of myself that’s self-destructive. Ian—every second!’

  This I can hear.

  Jon tells me that on one recent afternoon he did a scene with a new girl. When they were through they got on his Harley, and Jon got it up to 105 miles per hour on the freeway He says he almost lost it at one curve but kept going anyway.

  “And I like this girl,” he says.

  Jon’s call waiting beeps. He comes back and says he has to go.

  “I’ve waited till the last minute. Now they need me, I have to go do a scene. It’ll probably be boring on the set, so maybe I’ll call you back. What’s your number?”

  Jon says his Wizard and car phone were stolen last week.

  “I believe in karma,” he says. “With all the bad shit I’ve done, this kind of thing doesn’t surprise me.”

  Before hanging up I ask Jon who he’s having sex with today, more for a vicarious thrill than anything else.

  He pauses.

  “I don’t ... I couldn’t tell you,” he says.

  Jon lets out a chuckle, like he sees the irony, then tries some more to remember!

  “Honestly, Ian, I couldn’t tell you.”

  1997

  NINETEEN NINETY-SEVEN. IT’S BEEN MONTHS SINCE I’VE SOUGHT ANY CONTACT WITH JON Dough, and longer—a year—since talking to any other subject from this book. At last contact Jon was living with Cheyenne, a part-time porn actress he met shortly after CES ‘96. He bought her a puppy, a Rottweiler. Jon was barely doing scenes at all, just directing.