Not everyone in the industry behaves as professionally as I do, though. I've shot with many photographers who didn't pay much and weren't the easiest guys to get along with. It's very frustrating when they're yelling at you to do something that is physically impossible, or when the person paying for the shoot wants to control everything. For example, I was shooting a billboard for a strip club in LA, and not only was the guy so cheap that he hired a food photographer – to shoot for free – but he also wanted creative control of everything, including me!
I can't stand it when people at these shoots are too hands-on, trying to move me into position rather than just telling me what they want. But this club owner thought he could just fling me around, pulling my arms in different directions, all the while having no clue what he was doing. I was not impressed at all.
Another, much more famous, photographer I have worked with thinks he's the shit, like he's the best photographer in the world. He'll even tell you that to your face, if you can believe such arrogance. This guy didn't even shoot me but had his assistant do it while he was doing something else in the other room. He'll pay each girl US$400 or US$500 and they have to put up with his crap. I heard from one girl that he got her to hold a pose and while she was doing it, not moving a muscle, he just left the room and went out to lunch and didn't come back. What an asshole!
And it's not just the photographers who can be temperamental. Sometimes, your fellow porn stars can be just as bad. A well-known male porn star and I used to work together frequently because we had great on-screen chemistry. We had shot a lot of scenes and he was always on my top-five list, until one day he totally screwed me over.
After shooting with me the night before, he ran into me at the doctor's office, where either he or his girlfriend were being treated for gonorrhoea. I had never had the disease at that stage, but nevertheless he called the director and told him that I had given it to him. He said that I knew I had it and was going to work anyway. I was at the doctor's for something totally unrelated to that, but he just assumed I was there to get tested or treated for gonorrhoea, and he made me look like a scumbag.
So the director cancelled my scene for the next day and said I should get tested – which I did, and I was clean. I sorted things out with the director and eventually finished the movie, but I will never forgive this guy for doing that. He also told that story to many people, when it was just not true.
That's just a reality check for some girls who think this is all about glitz and glamour. And here's another: leaning back against a couch and keeping still while you're holding your vagina wide open for a still camera, waiting for the close-up to happen and praying your last shave will look good – that's not a regular day at the office for most girls, but it sure is to me.
You do have to be mindful of the mind-fuck, so to speak, when you get to my level. For instance, when I do live chats on the IM Live site (www.imlive.com), I get my share of strange requests from the fans. There's the usual boob-licking, pussy-squirting and foot-fetish stuff , but I also get asked to consider doing pissing and scatting – guys wanting me to say 'I want you to eat my shit' and one guy who said he likes shit on his belly and balls so he can fuck it back into the girl.
I also get asked about using my panties. One guy said he only wanted to buy them if I stuffed them inside my pussy first! (I mean, how the hell do you stuff your own panties inside you? How painful is that?) I also get asked to simulate cum in my mouth – these guys like me to put my mouth to the webcam and use my spit to pretend it's their cum. Oh boy.
But, of course, I can't or won't always cater to what everyone wants, especially the rude fucks who are just plain demanding. Instead of asking me to do something, they seem to think they can tell me what to do, like I am some stupid whore stuck in a cage or something. If I'm not comfortable doing something, I simply won't do it. That's just how I work, even though some people don't seem to understand that.
The crazy sex is definitely not confined to the internet. In August 2008, I shot one of my strangest scenes when Jim Powers directed me in The Violation of Harmony, for JM Productions. Basically, the plot was like America's Next Top Model. We were the contestants, and the porn star Harmony was the Tyra Banks character, only white. She was a total bitch to all of us and had pushed us too far, so we turned on her and raped her. It took all day to shoot and I was really exhausted in the end. Being mean really takes a lot out of you! The girls were Audrey Hollander, Summer Bailey, Holly Wellin, Jennifer Dark and me. It was a really wild shoot because Harmony was a chick who could take anything! She was very loose (if I can use that adjective as a compliment), because we were sticking huge toys in her, double-penetrating her and sometimes sticking two sex toys in her pussy and one in her ass simultaneously. We were holding her down, smacking her face and even sticking our dirty feet in her mouth and making her lick them. We were calling her names and telling her what a fat whore she was. It was brutal.
Jim Powers was good to work with as a director. He's very cool and a bit of a smartass, and somewhat perverted. At one point, he had me stick my foot inside Harmony's vagina. I mean, I actually had my whole foot in this chick, up to my ankle. It felt pretty disgusting and gross, to be honest, because it's just not normal to have your foot in such a place. And I'd always thought of myself as a girl who didn't pussyfoot around!
I can take perversions, believe me, but we all have our limits. Jim Powers was Walt Disney compared to some other directors I've worked for, like Martin Del Toro, who really loves shooting rough sex with women.
I did a blow-bang scene for him once in which I sucked off five guys. Quite appropriately, the movie was entitled Cum Greed, and it was released in 2005 by VCA. They were all really rough with me, grabbing my head and pulling my hair and ramming their cocks down my throat, because that's what Martin, as the director calling the shots, wanted. Most of the guys felt bad, I could tell, but one of them loved doing it, from the way he grabbed and manhandled me.
Sure, I can do this stuff , and I'm game for extreme sex, but it was a really rough scene and in the end I felt so degraded. I had make-up running all down my face, and the scene had climaxed with all of them ejaculating on me. Not all over my face or my breasts, bukkakestyle, but rather each one of them took turns to shoot his sperm right into my mouth. Then I had to spit it out onto the camera lens and slurp it all back up, before spitting it out again. It was seriously nasty work.
On another occasion, I also had to pee into a guy's mouth. The actor was Alec Metro and I stood over him for ten minutes before I could expel any urine. I eventually peed right into Alec's mouth and he actually gargled it before swallowing. I was grossed out. I mean, this was before our sex scene, so I was doing this glorious act of urophilia to a man I then had to have sex with. I have no idea why anyone would even want to see such a thing.
So, I'll challenge anyone to tell me if they've encountered weirder ways of making money. What we girls get paid is oft en not at all commensurate with the head-trip we have to endure to play those parts. It's amazing to me when all these teenage girls come up to me and say they want to become porn stars because they are nymphomaniacs and think it is just so glamorous. Little do they know, especially about the fine line between exhibitionism and exploitation. I do understand how some guys enjoy looking at girls who behave like total sluts, but it can sometimes get downright tasteless.
There are times when even I am stunned by how absurd this profession is. It's literally a dirty job, and someone has got to do it. I've had to shoot scenes with guys I used to date. Imagine having to fuck someone you broke up with, because you're getting paid to do it! In one case, a pornstar ex-boyfriend of mine called Barrett Blade hadn't worked with me for at least four years. It was great in the end, but I'm sure we were both thinking the same thing while the cameras were rolling. It was actually kind of a turn-on for both of us, as it turned out. You could rationalise it and remind yourself that, well, at least you already know the guy, when in fact, really, it's just t
oo surreal.
I've also had to do scenes with guys and girls whom I didn't particularly like as people, as well as those with whom I had great sex but who stabbed me in the back afterwards. For the legion of nymphettes scouring the San Fernando Valley for work every week, these kinds of scenarios will become part of their bread-and-butter month after month, year after year.
There's a lot more to this job than its just being well-paid work for any exhibitionist who loves sex. It has always been my own personal belief that you have to be truly, uniquely courageous to stay the course. You become a commodity, something to be bought and sold like a box of cereal on a shelf. There are people within the industry who will keep treating you like this. And sexual harassment on the job does happen, however ironic that must sound.
I can honestly say I have never gone so far as to do anything for anyone just to get a role. I do remember one incident, though, back when I was very new to the industry. A very well-known director asked me if I wanted to go to an audition at his house at around 9 pm. I mean, come on. Who holds auditions at their house at night? The studio he was directing movies for already held huge castings all the time at their offices during the day. I wasn't that naive. So, of course, I said no. And the result? He never once put me in any of his movies, not even to this very day.
Chapter Eight
HEALTH BEFORE
WEALTH
The first time you see me in the 'Behind the Scenes' section of Dark Angels 2: Bloodline, my personal favourite of all my films, it isn't the part where I'm fl exing my legs and practising my kick-boxing stunts. Neither is it my rehearsals of the fight scene with Dillon Day where he's on the ground and I attack him from above, which we went over again and again while trying not to laugh. It is the part where I'm bending over, trying to do some warm-up callisthenics and yoga stretching exercises. Why? Because they could point the camera straight at my ass and shoot me from behind. But, in all seriousness, warming up and stretching are very important parts of my job.
To survive this business, you have to take care of your well-being. I am quite a believer in the holistic mind– body relationship, and I do think that a sound mind needs to go with a sound body. This industry constantly poses challenges to that equation. I can barely count the weird things I have had to deal with now, because there have been way too many to recall, but let me cite a few.
Back when I started out, when Roy Garcia was my agent, I did a shoot for a Japanese company. I was brand new and willing to try pretty much anything. A Japanese company came into town with some famous Japanese male porn star (and a translator, because none of them spoke English). We started the scene off like a typical gonzo shoot – no plot, no script – and then suddenly they're yelling at me to scream louder.
So I thought, 'Okay, they want me to highly exaggerate it.'
I did the loud moans and groans, and then they were like, 'No, louder!' So I did it louder. And again, 'Louder!'
At that point, I stopped and said, 'Look, are you fucking serious? I'm moaning as loud as I can!'
The translator pulled me aside and told me that the Japanese get off on the appearance of a girl getting raped. So they actually wanted me to scream like I was terrified, like I was being raped. And he wasn't kidding. That's what they wanted. I was not comfortable with this at all. I didn't sign up to be 'raped', nor did I want to act like I was, and I thought the whole thing was really twisted. So I did the best I could do. I realise I could have just acted and screamed like crazy, but it just didn't seem right to me. Apparently, they were not happy with my performance at all. But who cares? I wasn't happy with the way I was treated. How was I supposed to fake being raped like I was enjoying it?
I know this is a very real phenomenon in Japanese porn – the prevailing theory is that Japanese men are brought up by very strict mothers and use porn to channel their resentment of women – so we had a real culture clash there.
On another occasion, I found myself sought after for yet another Japanese scenario. This shoot would entail me spending an hour kicking a guy in the nuts really hard and then jerking him off to pop – a quickie scene for US$500. When it was offered to me, I thought, 'Hmm, wouldn't that be hilarious, to kick a guy in the nuts?'
Later, I learned that the Japanese have a whole sub-genre of porn dedicated to this, which even has a name – tamakeri (which, loosely translated, means 'ball-kicking'). There are female porn stars in Japan, like Erika Nagai, who specialise in it, and there are even ground rules to be observed (yes, tamakeri etiquette). The male actor has to maintain his erection during and after he is being kicked, and the girl is supposed to kick him as hard as possible so that a loud, slapping sound can be heard. Japanese social scientists have studied tamakeri, and one of them, Nobuhiro Hashimoto, believes it's due to the 'latent masochism' in Japanese male culture – the kind of thing that's also exemplified by other kinds of Japanese porn, like scenes featuring the opposite of a gang-bang, where a bunch of hot Japanese babes take turns urinating on a helpless guy, and those where the girls, after pissing, take turns excreting on the guy! Japanese guys really get off on this kind of shit? I'm not sure I'd venture any further than tamakeri, thank you.
I did once work on an anime porn project, using my voice for the English version of the soundtrack. The film was called Kokudu-oh and it was a lot of fun to record. I love doing voice-over work and would like to do more of it. In this particular anime (or, more precisely, hentai, as animated porn is called in Japan), I voiced Princess Bellecher, a very sexy blonde virgin princess, with (of course) huge boobs. There was a prince and another girl (voiced by Aria Giovanni) and the whole thing consisted of four episodes.
The storyline has the prince looking for a wife to become the queen of the kingdom. In one scene, he rapes Princess Bellecher in a jacuzzi and the tub fills up with blood, and I had to make the funniest noises to kind of make it sound like the Japanese version. Another scene had him locking Princess Bellecher up in a room before tying her nipples to the floor so that every time she tried to move, she would be in great pain. And he also gives her an enema at one point. There was a lot of raping and sexual abuse going on in that movie – just the way they like it in Japan.
We were recording my voice to sell the film to an American fan base, but I don't think it did very well over here, because the company went broke. When I had to sign autographs for it at a comic convention in Long Beach, though, the comic fans went absolutely nuts. They love these hentai movies – and the queues were even longer than the ones I've dealt with signing for real porn fans at the AVN Expo!
How do I do this kind of work at all, you might well ask, and what does it do to my head? On the simplest level, all porn stars know that we have to perform blow jobs while we're being filmed, and that alone is a mental Zen exercise. There's a lot of gobbling in porn, so if you don't like taking a penis in your mouth you can't be a porn star – there's no two ways around that. But there are a lot of issues you have to be mentally prepared for.
For starters, you have to find different ways to pleasure a guy orally, and the girls who are good at it know all the tricks – using saliva, sucking his balls and then his shaft and going back and forth on that, using one hand to stroke and sometimes both hands to rotate the area around the shaft – but there are times when you've got to work five times as hard for the same result.
And then there is the whole issue with swallowing sperm. Some girls really get neurotic about this but I don't have a problem with it at all. In real life, I like swallowing if I like the guy I'm with. For a movie, I'll swallow if I'm directed to do so. It doesn't matter who the guy is, really.
What I don't like is getting cum in my eyes. I remember one shoot where I was told I was going to be doing a threesome. I wasn't told the names of the girl and the guy or anything before I arrived and actually met them, and when I did they were strangers to me. (Isn't that amazing? Going to work, not knowing whom you're going to be fucking, only that you will be?) Anyway, the truth is I like doing
threesomes. I don't mean necessarily in real life, but when it's for a movie. The reason is clear after you've worked like I have for a while. Because you're doing two positions each – two on the girl and two on the guy, instead of four positions on just one guy – it's so much easier on your body.
The shoot turned out to be quite long, but it was pretty good. The girl had big titties, which I love. The guy who was scheduled for our scene bailed out because he had girlfriend drama (how lame!) so we got a production assistant from the crew to do it. Lucky guy, huh? He was awesome and had a nice cock. It was his second scene ever, and he came all over our faces when it was supposed to be only from the chin down. He just couldn't control it. It was a real 'Peter North' pop shot, as we call it (named after the male porn stud famous for his 'beer can' ejaculations). But I was not happy about getting cum in my eye. It was still throbbing after the shoot and I had to cancel a live chat session for my website that night. Damn it! Did anyone ever warn me about the occupational hazard of getting cum in my eye? Of course not.
There have been times when I've felt like the guy had too much control over me when I was sucking him, and that I was giving away too much of myself. Lots of guys just want you to suck it because it's an ego trip for them. In my personal life, if I sense that they're just being a selfish prick, I won't always give them the satisfaction (simply because I know I do it pretty well, and they need to earn that privilege from me).
When all you have to do is a blow-job scene and you don't have to have penetrative sex with the guy, giving good head is an excellent way of performing to get quick cash. This is truly a win–win situation if the guy I have to be with happens to have a very large cock.
Absolute Mayhem Page 10