by Gerrie Lim
Adam & Eve was about to release for the first time on DVD her pet project, the film Appassionata, a classical-porn period piece set in the time of Mozart, for which she wrote, directed, produced, acted and even scored the music. (The film received seven nominations at the 1999 AVN Awards.) Asia even did the DVD authoring herself. Computer geek, terminal overachiever, not to forget MENSA member, Asia is considered the smartest woman in porn with an I.Q. of 156. And one of the richest. I had written a now-famous piece on her, published in September 1999 in The Wall Street Journal, about her legendary stock-market prowess. (“If You Think Investment Gains Can Be Obscene,” ran the headline.)
Well, why not? If the porn audience comprises a wider range of folks out there than most people might imagine, that’s simply because porn is the most democratic of pop culture genres, with something for everyone. There’s kitsch and camp as well as serious and ironic, and aesthetic details to suit every whim and fancy. How could it be otherwise, with the fake eyebrows and fake boobs galore, not forgetting fake names and sometimes even fake personalities to match?
In my reportage of the AVN Awards, I chose to close with an anecdote that illustrated this. On the Southwest Airlines flight back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas, Cassidey, the newest Vivid contract girl, best known outside porn for her appearance in the infamous Enrique Iglesias “Sad Eyes” video, found herself seated next to an average-looking, middle-aged couple. Making conversation as the plane took off, they asked the slender doe-eyed brunette what she did for a living.
“I’m a porn star,” Cassidey replied.
Her flight companions had never seen her movies, not Diary of Desire, Tonight, Marissa, or House Sitter, not even the more prosaic, hyper-gonzo Shane’s World 21: Cliffhanger. So, taken aback somewhat and perhaps not believing her, the couple asked her if she had any pictures of herself to show them.
“Sure,” Cassidey complied, promptly pulling from her carry-on bag a hardcore magazine featuring her in a photo spread. She showed them pages and pages of her, buck-naked, legs spread-eagled, her pussy and asshole open for their visual assessment. Plus a few more, of her being penetrated by a rock-hard cock.
The wife looked amused. She asked Cassidey some questions about what it was like to work as a porn star. The husband, however, looked completely out of sorts.
His eyes seemed about to pop out of their sockets as he perused the pages of the magazine, and his face visibly reddened. He had a sheepish expression, as if to say he wished his wife hadn’t been there, for there was no doubt as to what he would really have liked to do with Cassidey.
I felt his pain. But I was always the sort of guy who could’ve spent a very pleasant flight seated next to Cassidey, checking out her layouts. I’d seen them before anyway, and, unlike that poor husband, I’d have no problem letting her know they turned me on. Porn stars love being told that. I know it would certainly make her happy.
She’s a porn star, off-duty, on the plane heading home. What else did I think was going to happen?
Lust on the Orient Express
A is for Asia
Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night … and I wonder: How the heck did all this happen?” So began the AVN Online cover story of January 2002, entitled “Deep Inside the Temple of the Geek Goddess: How a Mild-Mannered Porn Star Became the Master of her Virtual Domain,” with the byline “by Asia Carrera.”
It was a first-person memoir, detailing how she became known as not merely an A-list porn star but also an A-list Internet webmistress. What was really interesting about it, however, was the fact that she didn’t actually write it.
I did.
It was the most interesting piece of ghostwriting I had done, and the result was so spectacular that Asia herself had the cover of that particular issue framed. She hung it up on the wall of her home’s computer room (the actual physical domain of the webmistress herself, of course). I was commissioned by my then-editor Erik McFarland, who called me out of the blue one afternoon with the assignment.
Word had somehow gotten out that I was working with Asia on her autobiography, which my literary agent was then shopping to the publishing houses in New York, and so Erik hatched the brilliant idea to have me pen a piece “written” by her about her own life, with particular emphasis on her online presence.
This, of course, was an angle loaded with cultural relevance. The Internet revolution had been highly instrumental in making certain porn stars bigger than others and, arguably, the single biggest subset of adult entertainers to benefit from this were Asian porn stars.
Also, a lot of computer geeks happened to be Asian guys (or male Asian geeks who didn’t have girlfriends), and there are some very telling statistics verifying this. Asia Carrera and Annabel Chong both told me that a very high percentage of their fans were Asian. At the strip clubs, Asian guys turned out in droves whenever Asian or Eurasian porn stars were feature-dancing.
In my own time in the porn trenches, I had come to meet and interview quite a few, most memorably Kira Kener (half-Vietnamese), Gwen Summers (part-Japanese) and Stephanie Swift (part-Filipino). The most popular of them all, whom I did not meet, was Tera Patrick (half-Thai); I did see her walk by not ten feet away from me at the 2001 AVN Awards, the year she won the “Starlet of the Year” trophy, almost unnoticed “because she was dressed much more conservatively that the other attendees,” as I wrote in my Penthouse Variations piece on the big event, published in February 2002. (The reason we didn’t meet was that I didn’t recognize her myself, not until after she had walked by!)
Of course, Tera never had to flaunt her assets in public all that much, given her wild reputation. A former mainstream model with a nursing degree, she surrendered a degree in microbiology to become a porn star. Tera truly exemplified the sexually adventurous persona of the Thai sex kitten. My favorite quote of hers came from the July 2000 issue of AVN, in which she said: “A lot of girls tell me I don’t understand because I’ve always had big breasts. I mean, I woke up at thirteen with 36DDs, okay?” She paused for effect and cupped them with her palms. “I walk around, and I hold these, and say ‘Thank you, God.’”
Mind you, most Asian women who aren’t in the business possessed neither those kinds of assets nor the glamour-puss veneer of Tera Patrick and Asia Carrera. I had spent a lot of time talking with Asia about this, mostly over drinks by her pool at her house in Woodland Hills (before she married and moved to Hawaii and then Utah). Asia was unconventional in that she had a lot of female fans, simply because of who she was, proving that there were indeed women out there who aspired to be both smart and sexy. I knew Asian women who were totally in awe of her legend. June Wang, a Chinese-American film producer I knew, actually made a documentary about Asia (the film, unfortunately, was never finished).
The mini-memoir in AVN Online that we were to collaborate on was a brilliant idea, since I probably knew more about Asia and had spent more time with her than any other writer she knew. I’d done several pieces on her already, including a long profile in my February 2000 “Cinema Blue” column in Penthouse Variations and the more famous Wall Street Journal piece of September 1999, which discussed her prowess at the stock market and the fact that she was a very popular porn star with a keen sense of humor, having written porn scripts under the pen name Dow Jones.
This led many people to ask me if our relationship had been entirely platonic. Some seemed shocked, even disappointed, to know that it was. In fact, Asia was sometimes surprisingly shy whenever I was on a set to watch her work. “That was the first time you’ve actually watched me have sex, wasn’t it?” she’d said to me, after I’d seen her “live” for the first time. “I’m so embarrassed!”
I was somewhat astonished but also touched to hear that. “Because I consider you a friend, not just a colleague,” she explained. “You even look like my father.” She was serious about the resemblence and it became a running joke between us. “I can’t date Asian guys,” she’d told me, “because I would always be thinking
that I was dating my dad.”
In point of fact, she’d never had a good relationship with her Japanese father (to this day, she remains estranged from both her parents) and she often confided in me many intimate details of the years of abuse at the hands of her overly strict parents, despite having been the straight-A student who would later go on to become a high-I.Q. MENSA member, a scholarship student at Rutgers University, and a piano prodigy who played at Carnegie Hall—twice!
The fact that I had lots of dysfunctional family issues myself was probably the main reason why I had a special fondness for porn stars and my friendship with Asia brought these memories and their attendent emotions up to the surface. I had always liked strong-willed, assertive women and there was no more powerful paragon of assertive womanhood than the female porn star, the archetype of the sexually strong female, who disdained both conventional norms and societal judgement.
Asia was a sexually assertive woman, but with a distinctly Asian twist—she was very soft-spoken and very shy, preferring her actions in front of the camera to do the talking, and her real-life reputation to do the rest. “Asia Carrera defied many porn star stereotypes,” wrote Anne Semans and Cathy Winks, in their book The Woman’s Guide to Sex on the Web, published in 1999. “She’s Asian (half Japanese, half German) in an industry dominated by the California blonde. She’s ambitious and multitalented, and she’s an unrepentant computer nerd.”
Most Asian computer nerds, of course, weren’t her size—5 feet 8 1/2 inches, 36C-25-36, and 110 pounds (at least, until her pregnancy and delivery; her daughter Catalina was born on March 4, 2005)—and fewer still owned pierced labia and a talent for vaginal as opposed to merely clitoral orgasms, a proclivity limited to some twenty percent of women in the world. “I come quickly, easily, and multiple times, so basically a guy has to be pretty darned lousy not to make me come,” she told an interviewer once.
She told me she was proud to be Asian, since she had many of the good Asian traits—the hardworking and diligent work ethic that careened towards perfectionism, clearly the Japanese side of her. Her mother’s German heritage boosted her perfectionism even more. No wonder she considered her best professional achievement to be her film Appassionata, a classical music tale set in the time of Mozart, made in August 1997, for which she wrote, directed, produced, starred in, and scored the music, even playing the piano herself. It received a record seven AVN Award nominations in a field of 7,000 new releases, and in 2000 she even wrote and programmed the digital authoring for the DVD version.
In the course of preparing the book proposal for my literary agent (basically her autobiography, co-written by me), Asia did a truly phenomenal thing—she gave me access to her personal journals, and also gave me permission to quote from them. No one else had ever seen them before, and she entrusted me with the whole lot.
They came in several spiral-ring notebooks, with entries that I found highly poignant and often painful. Many of these came from her late teen years, when she was suicidal. Like this one:
February 21, 1991
Man, what a fucked up childhood. Fucked me up. The household did it. Pressure, stress, how much could I be expected to take? I was an alcoholic, I remembered today, and a druggie. I smoked. I was suicidal an awful fucking lot. Without my friends I would have been dead long ago. Remember how my parents hated me? Told me I was worthless, a disgrace, a whore, lazy, good for nothing? My mother said please leave and my father said please kill yourself. Oh, it’s all coming back. I remember many nights in desperate loneliness, lying on hard ground with slashed wrists, crying with a tearstained face for God to please, please kill me, put me out of my misery. I was alone so much, my parents grounded me always and took my phone and answering machine. Dad would send my friends away. I never talked to my brothers or sisters. I was so alone. I was glad for my parents’ hatred because I needed attention so desperately. I just wanted someone to care about me a little. I didn’t even know what love was. I thought it didn’t really exist, because no one loved me and I loved no one. I couldn’t. My parents were supposed to love me but they didn’t, so how could I believe in trust and love? I felt so worthless … I was starved for attention.
In a weird way, I liked that particular diary entry, because we had talked a lot about how many porn stars came into the business because of screwed-up childhoods, how the desperate need for attention led to extreme sexual exhibitionism, and how teenagers in such dire emotional straits usually confused sex with love and ended up in the adult entertainment industry.
Without realizing, of course, that it often offered no panacea. Even scoring a studio contract wasn’t always a career pinnacle, as Asia noted in some of her other journal entries, in the years after she became a
Vivid Girl:
September 15, 1995
Hi, it’s me, except it’s not really me, because I’m not Jessica now. I’m Asia. As I have been for two years now. I miss my diaries, so I’m gonna write again. I’m married, as of February 27, 1995, and still working as a porn star. I was a Vivid Girl for a year, but I left now, and Steve Hirsch is trying to keep me from working. He has gotten me knocked off an R-movie and a non-sex role, but I just shot a commercial for Playboy and I’m doing a video vignette for Playboy next week. I also appeared in their “Book of Lingerie” this month. I auditioned to be VJ for the Spice Channel, but I didn’t get it. That made me sad. At least I made it to the finals. I won the “Performer of the Year” at the AVN Awards show in front of 2,000 people and that makes me very proud and happy. I’ll be sad when my year is up. Money is tight, because Bud has borrowed $5,000 from me. I hate having no money. I hate not having enough work. I feel like a has-been and I fear getting older. Time is so limited. My death draws nearer and nearer. My name must get bigger before I die. I hope someone will collect my diaries and tell my story when I am gone. That’s why I’ve kept them! I have a great story and I’ll tell the young and beautiful and hopefully famous. 3–5 more years. Sleeping pills. I hate my fucking life and I’m extremely depressed. Not much has changed in 8 years!
The centerpiece of her turbulent marriage to director Bud Lee was none other than Bud’s chronic drinking problem, which came to a head one night when he beat her up and then woke up the next morning in an alcoholic stupor and swore he couldn’t remember a thing. It was the wake-up call he needed, which led to him quitting the booze for good. Suffice to say, large portions of Asia’s diaries would not have materialized were it not for the co-dependent nature of their dysfunctional marriage (and eventual divorce). One week after the aforementioned entry, for instance, she wrote:
September 23, 1995
I don’t feel like living. Every day, I wonder why I’m here, why I bother. I’m tired of this, of fucking and stripping to make a living. And now I’m not even making a living because I have this husband who is an endless money pit. I can’t keep treading water for the two of us. I can’t sink any lower to make more money. There is no lower. I CAN’T GET ANY LOWER. I’M A SLUT, A WHORE, AND I HATE MY LIFE. I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE. I CAN’T. I CAN’T! I’m going to take these here sleeping pills and maybe I won’t have to wake up anymore because I don’t love me or value me. All I want to do is destroy me. SLUT. WHORE.
And yet, two months later, she created the first of her real crowning glories—her film A Is For Asia, which she wrote, directed and produced. It was made right after she’d left the security of her Vivid contract, and she was hellbent on a personal victory. What also made it work was the storyline—Asia played a porn star being directed by Bud in a movie that called for her to do her first facial cumshots and her first anal sex scenes, two work obligations that didn’t sit at all well with her husband, a working porn stud played by Jonathan Morgan. The movie, in short, dealt with the distress experienced by couples working together in the business, and the jealousies that arose when one or the other had sex with total strangers. It was a grand visual depiction of how porn astutely separated love and sex.
There were other films in t
he Asia Carrera canon that I’d always liked—namely Forever Young (1994), Intimate Strangers (1998), and Search for the Snow Leopard (1998), as well as a highly compelling scene in Andrew Blake’s Unleashed (1996), a three-way, boy/girl/girl with Vince Vouyer and Monique DeMoan. It was Playboy magazine’s October 1997 “X-Rated Video of the Month,” and one of my personal favorite Andrew Blake films.
But Asia told me she had no memory of it. “Unleashed? I don’t remember which one that was,” she said. “I did a couple of different movies for him, but they’re always artsy-fartsy, they’re all in a big glass mansion, they’re always namby-pamby softcore stuff, and they never have dialogue. So it’s hard to remember which one’s which!”
Blake, for his part, told me his favorite memory of Asia was seeing her off-camera, sitting around and waiting for her scenes. Most girls smoked or read their scripts or gossiped. Asia killed time by reading The Wall Street Journal and checking her stocks.
I loved that observation, how it subverted the nose-to-the-grindstone, doggedly determined, mercantile Asian stereotype that we’re known for the world over. Or perhaps it reflected my own paranoia, because I had issues with being Asian and, therefore, with being depicted in a particular light. And perhaps, in the end, that was why I chose to cover the adult film industry, to test to limits of social strictures, like any well-intentioned Asian porn star would proudly do.
A is for Annabel
I saw cultural subversion in its finest porn manifestation when I received an email from Annabel Chong, telling me that she was finally going to pull the plug on her website and retire completely from the business.
It was a serious undertaking, since killing your website meant killing your market value altogether. But Annabel did it in fine style, with typically anal-Asian panache. She left a snide note on her homepage, proclaiming her virtual death. “Annabel is dead,” she wrote, “and is now replaced full-time by her Evil Doppelganger, who is incredibly bored with the entire concept of Annabel, and would prefer to do something else for a change … The ED is a diabolical yuppie who is working as a web designer and consultant. She specializes in .NET with C#, Database Development and also does web design.”