by Oriana Small
A few months later, the piss scene in the bathroom ended up on one of Pro’s websites called PissMops.com. I felt like an idiot for trusting this guy. It was out of my control. Once you sign that model release, it’s over. As the performer, I surrendered absolute consent after I was paid for the footage. To tell the truth, I like that people can watch me getting pissed on my first time. I like piss now. By the time Piss Mops #2 was put onto DVD, I was ready for it. Pro Trusion even put me on the front cover.
Chapter Eleven
Gonorrhea
IT happened only two months after we started doing porn. While HIV tests once a month were mandatory, back in 2002, the syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea testing was free but optional. Tyler and I decided to get tested for all four diseases. Give us the works, the full panel! We felt proud to be doing at least one healthy thing for our bodies. “It’s the right thing to do,” we said. “We have to take care of ourselves now that we are in porn.”
The results came back a week later. HIV: negative. Syphilis: negative. Gonorrhea and chlamydia both came back positive. We got a courtesy telephone call from the Adult Industry Medical clinic. They needed us to come in and get medicated. They also needed us to give to them a list of the people we’d had sex with in the last month. I wanted to die. I felt so filthy, from the inside out. Welcome to porn.
I must have wailed “Oh my god, Tyler,” over and over, for hours. We sat on the floor of our apartment feeling stunned and sorry for ourselves. “Why did we have to get this? Why?”
“Well, we fucked a lot of people,” Tyler said. “It’s normal, I guess. I mean, to get this stuff in porn. I mean, we were going to get it sooner or later. Everybody does.”
It is not normal to fuck more than ten or twenty different people in a month. You catch stuff called gonorrhea. What was it? Was it diarrhea in your pussy? It was awful to dissect all the ways I felt I had become so sickening. I wanted to hide from the daylight people. People who got up before noon and went to work, people whose job liabilities did not include the risk of gonorrhea. We are no longer allowed in society, I thought to myself, we’re being punished. This was karma for staying up all night every night doing cocaine and having threesomes. Waking up at 3:00 p.m. and doing porn has consequences. They are called gonorrhea and chlamydia.
“Look, Ori. Calm down. It’s going to be all right. We just have to go in and get some medication. At least this is curable. We don’t have AIDS. We’re lucky.”
“Lucky? I don’t feel lucky! And I don’t want to talk about or think about the possibility of us catching AIDS. That’s awful, Tyler! Don’t say that! I can’t fucking handle the thought of that.” I was throwing a complete fit. I rolled around on the floor on my back, crying and kicking my feet. All my life, I’ve gotten the most out of good tantrums. As a kid, they felt so viscerally good. Now when they happen, they’re cathartic.
Tyler got up off the floor and walked into the bathroom to pee. I remained on the carpet, being morbid and negative. When he stepped out of the bathroom, he had a frown on his face.
“Um, I think I feel it. My dick doesn’t feel right. It’s hurting to take a piss right now. I think we should hurry up and get that medicine. Get up!” Now he was worried. So much for being the calm one. “Ori! Come on! I’m fucking serious! My dick hurts. We need to get there by five, hurry up!”
I was contemplating the devastating scenario of Tyler and me catching AIDS. We’d be shunned from everyone in porn. Our faces would be all over the news. We would have to live in an assisted living establishment because no one would want to help take care of us. Suicide would be the only solution.
“Ori, my dick feels really weird! Look at it!” he shouted, not in anger, but with fear. He’d shuffled out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. The cock looked tiny and frail. The white briefs he was wearing had yellowish green stains on the crotch.
“Ew, Tyler. What’s that? Is that why they call it the drip?” I was probably the one who gave it to him, and he was feeling all the symptoms. I didn’t have any. Who knows how long I had been infected. It didn’t even burn when I peed. There were no yellow or green stains on my panties.
We decided our gonorrhea and chlamydia were good excuses to leave town. That night, after getting the medication from Sherman Oaks, we drove to Houston. I have always had warm feelings about Texans. My dad’s family all live in Texas, but I don’t speak to them. Maybe it’s more like they don’t speak to me. I haven’t seen my father since he disappeared when I was fourteen. But I lived with him in Texas, briefly. It was in a town called Pflugerville, just outside of Austin.
Tyler and I made it to Houston the next morning. We drove all night, through the darkest parts of New Mexico and West Texas. We did cocaine the entire drive, so we were paranoid about every single light we saw in the middle of the desert. There were dozens of tiny red flashing ones. We were convinced we were being tracked by UFOs.
Tyler’s grandparents let us stay with them. They had a neat 1970s house that reminded me of The Brady Bunch. Tyler’s grandmother made us Frito pie. We stayed in Tyler’s old room, which was right next to his great-grandmother’s room. Tyler had been raised by his grandparents, Emmett and Naomi. They called him Scooter. I thought it was darling. He had such a loving family. The only thing wrong with them that I could see was that they were solid George Bush and George W. Bush fans.
We stayed at Tyler’s grandparents’ house for five days. That was how long our gonorrhea and chlamydia lasted. It was a pleasant way to live through the duration of our STDs, except for the constant lies we told to all of Tyler’s family. Why did we have so much money? How did our jobs allow us to take off for five days on such short notice? What exactly did each of us do? I couldn’t take being around Tyler’s family for very long because it felt too awful to lie. And it was too hard to keep track. Was I a secretary, a personal assistant, or a production assistant? Did Tyler sell cars or was he in sales? Did I get a big tax refund, or did I have a trust fund? We kept on having to go into detail with the lies, which accidentally got changed from person to person sometimes. We lied to everyone but Tyler’s younger sister, Desiree. She’d already witnessed firsthand what we did.
Desiree had come to visit us for the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a giant gathering in the desert outside of Los Angeles. Coachella was a major reason Tyler and I continued to do porn. Tickets for the thing were rather pricey, and we were so hungry to attend that we used it to justify selling our bodies. The event takes place every year in April. We began doing porn in March. Porno funded our party pilgrimage. We could buy as much coke and ecstasy as we needed, which was a couple thousand dollars’ worth. I remember saying how exciting it was to see all of these infamous bands. Now, I can’t even remember who played.
We flew Desiree out from Houston. She and Tyler had the same mother, but different fathers. Half-siblings, like me and my sisters. Tyler’s mom was married more times than my mother, but they are both named Cheryl. Desiree looked like her mother in the face. She was pale and very pretty. Her eyebrows were severely plucked, but she had big, blue eyes and a perfectly straight nose. Her whole family treated her like she was much older than seventeen. She quit going to high school but claimed she was on “independent study.” I knew what that meant. It’s a legal version of her mother letting her drop out of school. My mom did the same thing and put me in the “independent study” program when I was the same age. It’s for mothers who just give up making their kids go to school when parenting becomes too tough for them.
Before I met Desiree, I imagined her to be this hard-ass and worldly woman. She had a job as a hostess at some fancy restaurant in Houston—something I could never handle. I did the same type of job and got fired for sleeping at the front desk, just prior to entering porn. Desiree was also a full-time drug dealer. She used and sold crystal methamphetamine. Tyler was proud of her for her street smarts and for making so much money at such a young age. Desiree was proud of her business, too.
She and Tyler spoke often on the phone. They were close. I’m sure she knew that he sold hash in Barcelona while he was going to culinary school, but I’m not sure if she knew about the Dr¯ano acid he’d sold to the neighborhood schoolchildren. She looked up to him and found nothing wrong with making extra cash just like her big brother. She even sent us some product in the mail. As a surprise, Desiree would call the night before to tell us a present was coming. The next day, a FedEx envelope would arrive at our doorstep. I’d even signed for it. Delivered to our door with love, a bag of crystal meth and a couple bars of Xanax!
Bringing Desiree to LA was our way of saying thanks for all the packages of drugs she sent us out of the kindness of her little Texan heart. We never gave her any money for the meth she sent because we hardly had enough to pay our bills at the time. That was all over now—being broke was a thing of the past. Porno economy. There would be no limits to spending on all the fun we could have.
Desiree was a sweet little girl. I was taken aback by how young she really was. Her baby face was seventeen, no matter how much crystal she was doing. She tried to like me, but I could tell she didn’t trust me. Tyler told her I was a cheater, and that spoiled any chances of our being friends. It must have been so strange for her while Tyler tried to explain and substantiate the fact we did porn. She didn’t want to hear it, but she nodded and smiled, accepting it. I was so wrapped up in my own battles with morality that I didn’t really think about her well-being too much. The fact that she was seventeen and visiting us to hang out and do drugs should have been a bigger issue than my doing porn. Desiree said she could handle herself and had her life under control. Only three years older than her, I was the furthest thing from a good example. I tried to respect her decisions. She wanted to quit school and sell drugs.
Within the first hour of hanging out in our apartment, Desiree and Tyler taught me how to smoke crystal meth. Desiree fashioned a foil pipe into something that looked like an aluminum volcano. Tyler hollowed out a cheap ballpoint pen that served as a straw. Using the straw, we three chased the dragon together. After one of us lit the meth, melting it, we would take turns sucking up the smoke. The effects of smoking it, as opposed to sniffing lines, were much stronger. It smelled like a smokestack from a plastic factory. The smoke was a light grey and I could definitely taste every single chemical when it filled up my mouth. I tried to hold it in as long as I could, because that supposedly got you higher. Smoking meth made my whole body numb and light, without the burn that comes from sniffing it. It turned my brain into a ball of helium and lifted my body off the floor.
For days, the three of us smoked crystal, did coke, ate ecstasy, and drank booze. We made it out to the concert, four hours away near Palm Springs. I really can’t remember much, but I do have some snapshots from the trip. We look fucked up and very happy. Desiree, Tyler, and I are so skinny holding on to each other in the photos. A group of degenerates. Tyler’s eyes are half open and rolling back into his skull. We all have maniacal smiles on our mouths. It was supposed to be a good time. We had all the drugs we could possibly want.
On the third day of her visit, I had a shoot in Woodland Hills. It was for a movie called Grrl Power. My call time wasn’t until the afternoon. It didn’t really matter, because I was planning on being late. I was a few hours late, in fact. Tyler and Desiree dropped me off at the location. We were all super high on ecstasy, too out of it to leave Desiree at home alone. I didn’t feel good. But the director and production manager told me I was fine, so Tyler and Desiree left. It was probably for the best. Having an underage girl at a porn shoot could get everyone arrested. I stayed there to do my scene, but I was rolling so hard I could barely open my eyes during the stills. I’d already gotten the cold shoulder from the makeup artist.
Two different men on set lectured me about taking drugs before scenes and how it looked bad. They asked me what I was on and I told them, “Mmmm, ecstasy…” But I had no idea who they were or why anyone cared. This was porno, right? I was on the road to ruin, not success! Not one part of me felt guilty or sorry for doing drugs. I was a total mess, but they shot me anyway. I did a great scene, despite the bad looks and worse vibes I got from the entire crew. They were happy when I left. Tyler picked me up a few hours later, without Desiree. The director wrote out my check and told Tyler not to let me take as many pills next time.
When our infections cleared up, I was ready to leave Texas. We could retest and go back to work seven days after starting the antibiotics. We needed to get back to LA All of our shoots were rescheduled because of the STDs. No one in porno really cared that we got sick. Everyone was very sympathetic and understanding. We were not ostracized or treated poorly because of it. I was looking forward to going back. Porno had become the world in which we thrived.
After not being able to talk about porn and our involvement in it for so many days, I began to miss it dearly. I wanted nothing more than to speak freely about it and not have to hide from it. Even if I wasn’t proud of it or bragging about it, I wanted to be able to mention it if I wished. Tyler and I needed to get back where things were happening. LA was where people would be open-minded again. Where the Republicans were outnumbered and the weather was nice. Home to cocaine and pornography. Home to Trent and Ashley. Home, where we fit in. Hollywood. Home.
Chapter Twelve
Heart Attack
BECAUSE Tyler and I were doing coke every day and every night, and booze was just as excessive as the cocaine—we drank it all, beer, Scotch, vodka, whiskey, tequila, wine coolers, red wine, Goldschläger, gin and tonic, etc.—all of our porno money was spent as soon as we fucked for it. It was a blast to live in such a grand city and have the time and means to enjoy everything Dionysian within it. Los Angeles is the best place to live, period. Tyler and I frequented The Cat & Fiddle, Barfly, The Abbey, Improv, The Viper Room, Saddle Ranch, La Poubelle, and Birds. We went out dancing at Joya, 7969 Santa Monica, Hollywood Athletic Club, Three Clubs, and Fubar. We ate at Matsuhisa, Water Grill, The Pig, Cobras and Matadors, and French Market Place. We went anywhere we damn well pleased. Carousing was all that mattered, our skewed version of everyday, normal life. Our lives revolved around the next outing, the next party.
We remained living in the same cheap studio apartment. Even though we were making a few thousand per week in porn, we still only paid $575 a month for rent. Our neighborhood was full of transsexual prostitutes and drug dealers, so it was cool. Much better than the closed-minded and uninspiring suburb of Thousand Oaks. The filthy and unsafe elements suited us. It got unbearably hot in the summer without air conditioning. But we could be as loud as we wanted since it was so loud on the streets at night. There were fights, car crashes, police helicopters, and drunks. It was scary and fun at the same time.
Our place was cute. We painted the walls light blue with lavender borders. The bathroom was bright purple with a day-glow shower curtain. I painted little red roses in various spots on each wall. On the dark green fridge, I painted “I like food, food tastes good!” in honor of one of my favorite bands, the Descendents.
My little Sony boom box provided music when we smoked and drank all night. There was also a television and a PlayStation. Sometimes Tyler would challenge one of our friends to a coked-out marathon of Tony Hawk. I asked him to buy a DVD player after shooting a POV scene with some creepy producer. Tyler bought the video game player instead. I hate video games. There was a time when I got hooked on Nintendo, but I was seven years old. Now, it’s just Nofriendo.
We kept our cheap apartment relatively clean. You could catch me vacuuming at three in the morning. I refused to have a garbage bin in the place for fear of tempting the cockroaches that are just about everywhere in Los Angeles. Maybe it’s because the weather is so nice. Even on the cleanest streets in Beverly Hills, there are cockroaches. Roaches on our street were dark, fearless, mysterious. Diseased. I often had nightmares about them, and still do.
The best thing about the apartment was the twenty-four hour unlimite
d access to as much cocaine as we needed, thanks to Ernesto. Tyler and I were Ernesto’s best clients. We spent a thousand dollars a week on cocaine. He would even allow us to go in and get it when he wasn’t home. Tyler had a special method of breaking the screen off Ernesto’s kitchen window. All he had to do was slide it to the right and it would open just enough to crawl through. Tyler and I were such trusted friends that we knew where Ernesto hid the stash. It was always in a coffee mug right above the pantry. We would break off however much we needed and weigh it on the tiny drug scale. Usually a couple grams. The money was left on the counter. It was a beautiful system.
I never realized at the time how much of an addict I was. I had only tried coke a couple of times before Tyler found such a steady source in Ernesto. We would hang out in his apartment and before we were in porn he would give the coke to us for free. Soon it went from a weekend thing to a nightly activity. The word “addict” never applied to me though, or so I thought. I didn’t even consider myself a cigarette addict. I’d been smoking since I was fourteen, but I just thought it was because I liked it, not that I needed it. Tyler and I weren’t addicts, we said. We just liked to party. Drugs feed your mind such bullshit. It’s amazing.
Ever since Tyler had that first Viagra he became obsessed with the little blue pills. He insisted on getting his own prescription. He got it from a drug-dealer doctor that ran an urgent care clinic in Canoga Park. All the porno people went to him for pills. Without checking any vitals or stats, Dr. Dope prescribed my twenty-five year old cokehead boyfriend Viagra. We didn’t know very much about the drug, except that it was for old men. That, and if you mixed it with any nitrates you could die. Tyler wasn’t worried about harming himself since it was a porn director that gave him one in the first place. It had to be safe, right? As long as he didn’t do any poppers or sniff any VCR head cleaner, he’d be fine.