by Gerrie Lim
“It creeped me out,” she said. “It dawned on me, about this fantasy thing, why I got into this and what I’m accomplishing. I realize I provide a fantasy and I’m fine with that. But it freaks me out to know that they want my stuff and they’re smuggling it in. I think that’s a little bit odd. I mean, because if you get into trouble for having porn, you can get extra time, you can lose privileges, all kinds of stuff. They’re not supposed to have such access to porn anymore. I don’t know how they get my stuff.
“Some prisons, some jails and some correctional facilities are different than others, some are more lax with their rules and stuff—I’ve had prisoners request photos with no nudity,” she added. “I’ve only ever gotten a handful of letters that disgusted me and weirded me out. The majority of them, they’re funneling their energy and their fantasy into writing these letters. And they’re probably jackin’ off while they’re writing me these letters. It gives them something to do and it gives them a way to pass the time. And I think it’s okay. The problem that I have, to begin with, is how they’re finding me when they’re supposed to be being punished, you know.
“But I’m okay with it—I don’t write them back because I don’t want to establish relationships, be it friendships or whatever, and lead them to believe I am being special with them. I take it that some of these people aren’t as smart as normal people. And I don’t want these people to come looking for me. I don’t want a big long line at a convention, of people that are showing me their prison uniforms, asking me to sign it.”
She then read me some of her “jail mail.” Like this one, a typical masterpiece of purple prose:
“Dear Jessica: Hey baby, how are ya? I was just looking through a stack of fuck books and I had seen you have an address I could write to, so here I am. My name is Ted. I am five-foot-nine, blue eyes, brown hair. I’m 31 years old but I look a little younger. Anyway, I am not sure if you’ll be the one reading this but I intend to find out. I hope you will write me back as soon as possible. I would enjoy that very much. You are so sexy. You have a terrific body. I would sure like to have a taste of that pussy of yours. It looks so good. I’d fuck you for hours. I’d especially like to take you from behind. You have a beautiful ass that gets my cock tingling every time. I can tell that you know how to fuck. Right now, I’m in a men’s halfway house in Ohio. It sucks. I guarantee if you could know me, you’d probably like me. I am easy-going and not bad-looking. I find women very interesting and I like to pleasure them. I’d like to pleasure you. I’d especially like your lips around my hard cock. I bet you give a hell of a good blowjob. I can feel your tongue going up and down my sacs and all over my shaved balls.”
Jessica paused. “I’d like to know where he shaves his balls in prison.”
She laughed, and pulled out another letter. “One of the more serious ones,” she warned me.
“Dear Jessica: I recently saw your pictures in some magazines and attached was an address to write. I am currently an inmate at Franklin Correctional Facility in Malone, New York. I am serving a long sentence for racketeering and extortion. I was formerly a union vice-president, and the Manhatten D.A. decided to put me out of circulation for a while. I am somewhat famous in New York City. Not as famous as Gotti, but I came very close. You look quite stunning in your pictures and it’s unfortunate we can’t be hanging out in Las Vegas at The Bellagio or The Venetian. Are you familiar with John Stagliano from L.A.? He’s a porno producer whom I know. If you know him and see him, tell him Gootch from Brooklyn sends his regards. I’m also good friends with Jack Nicholson. Anyway, it sucks being in prison. This place is ten hours from New York and exactly 35 miles from the Canadian border. I guess my days as a bachelor there are over. But I miss all my beautiful girlfriends. I used to have the most beautiful girlfriends, a lot of spending money, good cocaine, and much respect. Now I have canned food, and thirty-five dollars every two weeks. I get to stay in shape and bodybuild, but who cares, where I am? Send some pictures. If you want me to send some money, no problem. If you want to visit, I’ll pay for your trip here and give you plenty of spending money. I’m no joke, sweetheart, I’m a man of my word. So write me, let me know what’s on your mind. Let me know if you’d be interested in having me take care of you.”
Well, that sure was different. Part and parcel, so to speak, of the fun of being a contract girl.
Other guys composed erotic poetry, dedicated to her:
“I love the way your miniskirt displays the beauty of your shapely thighs / Once you step into a room, you’ll be the cynosure of all the guys’ eyes.” And another, even more inventive, one: “That hourglass figure and that full sensuous mouth is working in your favor / Would you like to give these balls rolling with a different flavor? / If you’re not in the mood for any fucking / You can unzip my fly, pull it out, pop it in your mouth and start sucking.”
Jessica stopped reading and giggled. “I’ve gotten them from all over the world, let me tell ya. When I started doing porn, I realized that everybody everywhere would be watching me. The more people, the better. But I hope I never have to meet any of these guys. Prisoners are human beings too, but the thing that I have to think about, above anything else, is my safety. My personal safety comes first.” At the time of writing, in early 2006, Jessica was still a contract girl but had switched companies, having signed with Wicked Pictures, and she had not come to any bodily harm.
Ah, peace of mind, what a concept! In the world of porn stars, real life is never as simple as it appears and sometimes it can be a real struggle not to lose the plot. I received some insight into this from one of my favorite Vivid girls, Cheyenne Silver, after I’d interviewed her on-set in June 2001. Recent allegations had been posted on the Internet citing her appearance on some escorting websites. Her ex-boyfriend, Gregory Bauman, had given interviews saying he had been the recipient of hate mail telling him: “Your girlfriend is a whore.”
He also said he had taken out a restraining order on Cheyenne for stalking him. Now, that was a new one. I didn’t know what to make of that but I imagined that some of her fans were clearly more disturbed than he was, by the obvious disconnect: Cheyenne, a fetching brunette of Cherokee, French, and Irish descent, had such a wholesome, all-American look and some of her fans apparently took umbrage with the possibility that their lovely video sweetheart could ever be anything less than perfect. Like, God forbid, a prostitute!
But, I thought, perhaps some of these guys were jealous of Bauman and were projecting it, hence the hate mail. And, in all fairness, there was a conceptual problem here. Did these guys forgot that Cheyenne was a stripper who became a porn star? How could anything be so surprising, or some people be so naive? Cheyenne had been a model in Florida but failed to make the ranks and so chose to strip in Las Vegas, where she worked under the name of Wildcat, before getting into porn. Her first anal sex scene was in Cumback Pussy 12, produced by Elegant Angel, a whole two years before she was enshrined with the gloss of glamour—as a Vivid Girl and then Penthouse cover girl and the magazine’s Pet of the Month for December 2001.
The less glitzy reality, though, was that she’d had an illegitimate daughter when she was eighteen and had dropped out of college to raise her child. Her mother had become seriously ill, and so porn was the best way she knew of to pay all the bills, since she was supporting both daughter and mother. (Her mother eventually died.) Her daughter did not know what she did for a living and thought mom was just a model. She told me all this herself. “She knows mommy does pictures, I’m going to tell her the truth when she’s older,” Cheyenne confessed.
She claimed that Vivid had pressured her into getting a boob job, and even disclosed on her website that she cried when she got them done. “They wanted them perked up,” she wrote. There were rumors that Vivid had allowed her the luxury of doing only four movies a year and had paid her an additional US$100,000—if and only if she got her implants. I had first seen her pre-boobjob, in Shane’s World 19: Tropical Heat, a gonzo movie made in June
1999, which she still considered her most enjoyable film to shoot. She told me it was her personal favorite. She probably still had good memories of the business back then.
When I finally met her in person, in June 2001 in North Hollywood, we sat around after a shoot and chatted. She asked me to go to the Roxy to see a band she was helping out. We smoked cigarettes and shared a bottle of mineral water (ah, the closest I’d come to swapping spit with a porn star! I kept the bottle, should anyone aspire to procure it on eBay someday, not that I planned to sell.) Then, sensing she was at ease, I seized the opportunity to ask her about the whole Gregory Bauman business.
No, she shook her head, it was all lies. She said she was sad that a former boyfriend could become such an insane opportunist, grabbing instant fame on the Internet. She asked me to contact the industry gossip columnist Luke Ford, on whose site many of his comments had been reported, and to tell him to set the record straight. I did so, and Ford told me he had been told everything by Bauman himself, had not fabricated any of the details, and the stuff about her working as an escort was actually quite well known.
Hmm, interesting. Maybe Ford was the naive one, if he believed everything Bauman had said. Was there a line that any reporter crossed, even as a gossip columnist, whereby he failed to take responsibility for reporting fiction as fact? Who was really telling the truth here?
I didn’t know, but I did know this: I called Cheyenne to tell her about my conversation with Luke Ford. She answered her cellphone, and didn’t remember me.
Or the talk we’d had after the shoot.
So much for my being the Good Samaritan.
It kind of ruined Cheyenne for me as a celebrity. In retrospect, I think I had been rationalizing her newfound glamour. Truthfully, I certainly liked her better in Shane’s World 19, especially the gusto with which she gave a guy a blowjob on a boat out at sea, and her onscreen output after she’d signed to Vivid was gradually less than impressive. Many of the films were quite good (Ren Savant’s Jumping Track and Ralph Parfait’s End of the World, in particular) but Cheyenne’s sexual self seemed diminished. All she did most of the time was whimper and moan while lying dead still as some stud hammered away. She gave me the impression that it was all just a job to her now. Was a contract such a desirable thing, after all? What had happened to the porn star I once knew and loved, if only from afar?
Maybe I was the one being conned here. Maybe I knew how some of her fans felt now. Maybe it would’ve been better if I hadn’t met her at all. In porn, one always flirted with the fine line between perception and reality. And there are always barriers one shouldn’t have crossed.
It made me think about all the stuff that happened to porn people and their psychic baggage. There was always a darker side to the glamour game, and often the forces of commerce conspired to usher in hard reality checks.
Or sometimes, it could even be hard yet poignant. Of all the big Playboy interviews the magazine was famous for, my all-time favorite was the one in the issue of December 1998, with actor David Duchovny of The X-Files fame. He actually went on record to discuss his own favorite porn-viewing habits and disclosed that his favorite porn star was Alicia Monet. “If anything good can come from this interview, it’s that Alicia Monet would contact me and we could have lunch,” he told interviewer Lawrence Grobel. “God, if she only knew how many lonely periods she got me through. I don’t think porn stars know how weirdly important they are in people’s lives.”
Weirdly important—was there a more X-Files way to put it? “The truth is out there,” as the show’s slogan read. Several porn stars I’d met preferred to play down their social significance, with the right ounce of self-effacement. Occasionally, if they played it up, there was a good-humored levity to it that I always found charming. Sometimes, even disconcertingly so, as in the case of Belladonna, who remains one of my favorite adult performers.
Belladonna had performed the very first double-penetration I ever saw (on the set of the Michael Zen/Jill Kelly film, Perfect Pick 7: Sink the Pink) and, a few years later, I got to behold her bounteous assets again in a movie customized for her, Belladonna’s Fuck Me, directed by the European auteur Garry Gazzman and produced by the British company Harmony Films (distributed in the US through Evil Angel).
In the opening scene she took on three guys; the film’s finale featured three guys doing six girls (including Belladonna). In the interview segment, she talked about her experiences in the industry. “Once you do anal, that’s all they want you for,” she revealed, and how well she would know. In May 2003, at age twenty-two, following three years in the business resulting in some 250 films, she had decided to quit performing and started directing, mentored by Evil Angel boss John Stagliano (for whom she’d starred in his multiple-award winning film The Fashionistas, a disturbingly dark sex-and-fetish romp that was possibly her film to top all films). Her reason for quitting? She had contracted gonorrhea and chlamydia a couple times each and had endured several other infections.
“I don’t want to put up with any STDs ever again,” she told AVN. “That shit is what ruins my desire to fuck anymore. It really does. If I would have sex every day and walk away without any diseases, I would do it forever. There’s a lot of shit that goes around and it’s not good, especially as a female. You can lose your chance in life to have children. It’s draining on your body when you have to go to the hospital every fucking day and it’s not your fault.”
Two months earlier, she’s signed a five-year directing deal with the company Sineplex. The deal did not require her to appear in any of her films and she quickly shot three episodes for the first line, Bella’s Perversions, and then began talks with John Stagliano to direct some new movies for Evil Angel. (The Sineplex contract was clearly non-exclusive.) She had won four AVN Awards that year, including “Best Supporting Actress” and “Best Oral Sex Scene,” and was on her way towards retrofitting her career.
At the 2005 AVN Awards, her latest film The Connoisseur (produced by her new company Belladonna Entertainment in conjunction with Evil Angel), won the “Best All-Girl Feature” award, though that wasn’t the only all-girl event in her life. She’d also just delivered a healthy six-pound-seven-ounce baby girl named Myla, and her baby shower held a month before was actually filmed and shown on Family Business, the Showtime reality series about the porn business. Surely that was more important than all the awards in the world. How many porn stars could claim to breaking into the mainstream with their baby shower?
Still, I will always treasure the autograph she gave me on the Perfect Pink 7 set, just before doing her double-penetration scene. She handed me the latest issue of Hustler’s new magazine Barely Legal Hardcore (Volume 1, Number 2), in which she was featured in a sixteen-page spread as well as the centerfold. Aptly, she was seen being double-penetrated. She gave me the magazine and signed it “Licks and kisses forever”—a more sincere sentiment, I thought, rather than the usual syrupy “Love always” or some such—on a page which showed her in deep concentration, one penis in her mouth and another in her hand.
There was such a fresh-faced innocence to her, aged nineteen in those photos. Perhaps it was no coincidence that she came from Utah. I liked edgy, sexy people hailing from conservative places, because they were my kindred spirits. After all, I came from a famously ultra-conservative place, Singapore, and I certainly related to that sense of outlaw spirit. (“To live outside the law, you must be honest,” Bob Dylan once sang, a line that had reverberated in my head since my teens.) Years after that meeting, I was curious to see if Belladonna still had that same wild-eyed spark in the Harmony video, released in 2004, and to my surprise she still did. But there was something else too. A glint in her eyes, much deeper than the steely stare she’d beheld me with back in 2001, something that spoke of self-acceptance, or self-awareness, only intermittently present before.
Maybe a directing contract and a baby girl could do that to you. Maybe the best kind of deal was the kind you could give yourself, that sugges
ted your self-worth hadn’t been lost amid the contract negotiations and the flesh carnival. Porn was effectively a surrogate drug, enabling a girl to use her body to hold the pain of the material world, and often the pain of her own past, at bay.
I hadn’t been appraised of Belladonna’s past but I didn’t need to. I could easily guess. She’d been a neglected child who needed attention, and pulled all stops to get it with an adult career in her adulthood. So, really, who needed a contract anyway? Everybody, in the end, as they say, really wanted to direct.
Death and Taxes
One sunny afternoon I was hanging out with Asia Carrera at her house in Woodland Hills, when a car pulled into her driveway, and out stepped a director she had recently shot with, making a pit stop to deliver some videotapes.
We chatted amiably and shot the breeze. I had not met this particular director before, but knew of his work and was familiar with the company that had produced his movies. Suddenly, his cellphone rang and he excused himself to take the call, turning his back to us before stepping outside.
“How is this? Any good?” I quietly asked Asia, pointing to one of the videotapes. We were then still in the good old days of VHS, and it was the latest film she had made with the director. The copies were for her to sell to her fans on her website.
“Piece of shit,” she whispered back, winking.
We both laughed. When the director finished his call and asked us what was funny, we both said: “Uh, nothing. Private joke.”
This little episode resurrected itself in my head now and then, whenever I reflected on my years covering the adult film industry. Anything made to be sold as entertainment was subject to interpretation, but porn was a field begging to be mocked and scorned—not always deservedly so, but sometimes; there sure was a whole lot of really bad crap out there.