by Oriana Small
All of the other guests at the party were from porn. Mostly performers. Lots of guys were ogling Desiree. It’s hard to blame them. She was dressed like a prostitute, and in my clothes. She was wearing a tiny plaid skirt with a black bra and white cropped top. Only a pair of G-string panties covered her ass and snatch. Fishnet thigh-high stockings went with a pair of clear heels to complete the look. I didn’t want her to feel out of place, so I wore an equally slutty outfit to match.
Desiree wasn’t ready to wear those clothes. I never should have let her. She was so uncomfortable when we arrived at the party. At our apartment getting ready it was all fun and games. Playing dress-up, imagining getting lots of attention. But when it was real and the guys were staring, she didn’t like it. She was still a little girl. Everywhere she turned, there were real strippers and prostitutes partying for keeps. Groups of guys talked about how hard they fucked these chicks and about wood problems. Tyler and I let them know Desiree was only seventeen. All of the porno guys flirted with her, asking her when she’d turn eighteen.
Everyone thought Tyler and I brought his little sister in order to turn her out. You know, get her started early in the business. To them, she was better than barely legal. She wasn’t legal at all.
Some of the partiers were having sex in the bathroom and taping it. Two girls were grinding on each other in the living room. They began making out while sitting on some guy’s lap. A crowd formed around them. Desiree started freaking out. She didn’t want any of these strangers to think she was like the rest of the girls at the party.
“She was the one who dressed me like this!” Desiree declared to a room full of people, finger pointing at me, then demanded to go home and put on some clothes. I let her blame me for the way she was dressed. It didn’t matter to me what these other people thought.
I didn’t know how to be a big sister to Desiree. In my family, I was the little sister. Tyler allowed her freedom, with little protection. He let her cut loose, but didn’t seem to want to safeguard her or feel the need to beat her boyfriend’s ass when she was knocked up earlier that year, things like that. I don’t know exactly what it was, but they had an odd relationship. Tyler once told me that an older girl had sex with him in a shower when he was ten. He didn’t consider it molestation because he enjoyed it. Knowing that made me love him more—in some ways, I’d always searched for a lost soul who would need me to resurrect him from a complicated history. Desiree had some of that in her, too. They had the sweet-natured but reckless characteristics of damaged children who had grown up a little too fast and never enough.
Tyler surprised me by buying us tickets for a trip to Europe, just the two of us. Never in my most farfetched dreams did I think I would be able to go to Europe on my own! At twenty-one years old, I’d pay for the entire trip except for airfare. Tyler purchased the tickets on a whim at a travel agency in West Hollywood. This one extravagant and impulsive buy would be one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. Tyler’s irresponsibility worked in his favor half of the time.
In some ways, it’s hard for me to initiate risky decisions. With Tyler, I was the one who played it safe. I got upset if a bill was mailed in late. Tyler would tell me it didn’t matter. I hated eating fattening food. Tyler told me to enjoy the taste, rather than worry about the calories. I shopped at Macy’s and Tyler preferred more expensive boutiques on Melrose. His grandmother always told him he had “champagne taste on a beer budget.”
I grew up poor. My parents never had any money, and they were irresponsible with what little they had. It was a revelation not to have to worry about how much something cost. I had the money to buy whatever I wanted. If I wanted a thousand dollar watch, I could buy it. But I didn’t. What money we didn’t spend on going out and buying coke (granted, a lot), I saved. I had saved almost ten thousand dollars in just a few months. It was too easy. We didn’t have to spare ourselves any luxury and could still have money in the bank.
It was unreal how quickly my scenes added up. Every porno movie I appeared in paid me over a thousand dollars. When we left for Europe in November, only three-quarters of a year into the business, I’d already done so many scenes that I’d lost count.
I was ecstatic about the prospects of a European trip. My life’s sort of in the toilet, I thought, and Europe is going to cure it. I was in love and that was the only thing I was consistently proud of at that time, no matter how tumultuous the relationship was. Waves of guilt would unexpectedly crash and gnaw down on my soul, refusing to let me feel good about myself; often, porno felt like a moral death sentence. I was always lying about it. There were too many days when I felt like I was wasting my life because I was caught up in a world of sex, drugs, love, and experience for experience’s sake. I was killing my brain and abusing my body. Going to Europe would educate me, and, I hoped, inspire me to do something different with my life in the future. All roads do not lead to porn. The trip would be an accomplishment that I would be entirely proud of without mixed feelings.
The night before our trip, I was thinking of ways to get back at my mother—whom I prefer to call Cheryl—for being vile. She’d called me a few days before we were to leave, while Desiree was still in town. Cheryl knew about our planned Euro trip, but she probably didn’t remember. Her brain is seriously deteriorated from doing drugs her entire life. She phoned while I was in line at In-N-Out Burger. Desiree had started her period in my car. She had bled right through her sweatpants, so she waited in the car with Tyler. I was trying to order all of our cheeseburgers correctly. Tyler wanted “no tomato, yes grilled onions, no special sauce, just ketchup only.” He would throw a fit if it wasn’t just so. Desiree’s was simple: no onions.
I answered my cell phone and held it with my shoulder as I fished around in my purse for cash.
“So, do you have anything to tell me?” Cheryl’s voice was angry. I could tell by her rhetorical tone that she knew the answer to her own question.
“What? What are you talking about?” I was handing the money over to the cashier and felt rude. I was rolling my eyes. I was annoyed at the bitchiness in my mother’s voice.
“Well, do you have anything to say for yourself, young lady?” The voice got angrier. My mother hadn’t been mad at me since I was in high school. There wasn’t any reason for her to be. I’d been on my own since I turned eighteen. Nothing I did was any of her business. How dare she utter a demeaning phrase like “young lady?”
“Excuse me? What are you getting at? What’s your problem?” I had no respect for her. I responded with the same volume of nastiness. Cheryl had put me through misery all of my life. It angered and saddened me when she tried to play “mother” with me now. She hadn’t earned it.
“Well, I just saw my daughter on the internet…with a mouth full of cock!” She said it with such mean, matter-of-fact evenness.
I was disgusted and embarrassed. I could tell that her sole intention was to hurt, humiliate, and expose me. I was ashamed of her. Somehow, to hear her speak “a mouth full of cock” was cruder than me even having one. A mother isn’t supposed to say things like that. I wanted to vomit into the phone. Instead of fuck you, I venomously said, “So!”
“I think you better start explaining!” She was feeling powerful, and that wounded me deeply. She was trying to corner me.
“So what, do you hate me now?” I asked her. I knew she didn’t, but I had to ask.
“No,” she responded flatly.
“Okay,” I said back, in the same voice as hers. We sound very much alike.
“No. Not okay. I’m so mad at you! You’re all over the internet. You fucking little whore. Your mouth’s full of cock. I’m ashamed of you, to be your mother! You fucking little bitch!” Then she hung up on me. I didn’t get a chance to rightfully respond.
When someone finally handed me the bag of fast food, I was weak in the legs, in shock. I shoved the phone back into my purse and walked out of In-N-Out. My hands were shaking. We’d only done one line apiece that morning, just
to wake up. The tears came a few minutes later. I always knew that at some point I would have to talk about it with my family. Cheryl just had no right to be so vicious about it—she was probably with her grotesque boyfriend looking at porn when she’d found out.
I’ve never been scared of letting my mom down. Whether or not she’s proud of me makes no difference. Cheryl is a drug addict and a manipulator. It’s impossible to trust her. Just when it seems as though she cares, she’s got some ulterior motive to benefit herself. I’ve often promised myself that I would not talk to her anymore. Cheryl would have to wait.
On Desiree’s last night in LA, Tyler and I planned to take her out to dinner at Water Grill, one of the best restaurants in the entire city. Tyler made a special point to dine at all of the finest places. His culinary education in Barcelona made him an expert of exquisite cuisine. He taught me about food and opened my palate to a world of niceties I never knew existed. Being a bulimic since a young age, I’d thought of food as my enemy. I have Tyler to thank for changing that, even though I still have a serious eating disorder. I remember the first time I ever stuck my hand into my mouth and reached down my throat and puked up food on purpose. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1994. It stands out to me as much as the first time I had sex (May 27th, 1995). I was thirteen years old. Bulimia and sex started at roughly the same age. I threw up every meal, every day. It gave me pleasure, actually, even though I know it’s not healthy behavior. I loved it—it was exhilarating, I could feel a rush in my entire body, a rush of fluids out of the stomach, mouth, eyes, and nose all at once. I found it more orgasmic than sex, until I finally had orgasms at age nineteen.
In 8th grade I went to camp for a week. My mom went into my room while I was gone, to investigate a foul odor coming from my closet. She opened the rickety sliding door and found six or seven tightly tied Von’s grocery bags, all full of puke. I’d been hiding the purging after my mom caught on to the bathroom. My newest scheme was turning up my stereo with my bedroom door shut and vomiting in homemade barf bags from the grocery store. Food in. Food out. Back in those days, I had no pager or cell phone. So my mom sat on this horrible discovery for the entire week I was gone. She told all of her friends, my aunts, uncles, cousins; everyone I knew. She was worried, but mostly she was pissed off and disgusted. I have always had a high threshold for the gross, the vulgar, the sickening. For me, it is a source of happiness and excitement.
In junior high, I discovered that almost each one of my pretty girlfriends were also throwing up. We just flocked together, the beautiful and the vomiting. A clique, taking turns at the toilet, in my best buddy’s backyard (her dog ate it), in bushes behind the school. In my bedroom closet, in a plastic bag. We were always thinking of new places to do it, and finding new girls to share it with. Sounds like a fetish now, but we were too young and lame to know what a fetish was, or to understand the damage we were doing.
Only in porn would a person’s wretched habit of shoving her hand all the way down her throat be considered a talent. I was praised and encouraged to puke and fist my mouth. It was perfect. I loved myself and my eating disorder. Every time I sucked a cock, the hand had to go in first, laying bare the darkest part of my soul. And I was encouraged to take it there. This was and remains a disease that plagues my mind so heavily, and it was sexualized. And it seemed like the right thing to do.
I cannot have any kind of sex to this day until my hand goes in my throat. Pull out some of my soul’s thirteen year old innocence and curiosity. That’s what I’m reaching for. I can erase everything I know with that hand down my throat. Fresh tears, cleansing the mouth with watery saliva, recreating innocence—returning to an innocent state. I think it does work. I still go there.
But I can’t throw up anymore. I’ve graduated to natural laxatives and enema bags. Not as conventionally sexy as vomit, they have their perks. I get to keep my tooth enamel. My intestines are clean enough to make blood sausage with. Now that I’m older and wiser, I have more free time and less ability to bounce back from convulsions. So I focus on the asshole now. It can take a lot of beatings and blasting. Thanks to porn, I know about this mysteriously resilient piece of the Digestive Lexicon. I’m fascinated by feces, anyway. I love to look at shit and fantasize about how it came to be. It’s so disgusting. I do love that feeling of strong repulsion.
For Tyler, cooking food was an art form, to be indulged in but not to be abused afterward. Good chefs were fine artists. When Tyler cooked, it was magnificent. It filled me with hope for a better world. But cocaine is an appetite—and therefore a cooking—suppressant. Though it rarely happened—or because it rarely happened—watching Tyler cook was better than watching him fuck. You could see the creativity blazing in his head. When he first moved to LA, he had jobs in the kitchens of Patina and Asia de Cuba. Even with his degree and training in Europe, he couldn’t make enough money to survive in the city on kitchen wages, not for the kind of fun that Los Angeles has to offer. Porno didn’t inspire Tyler to cook. We made plenty of money for him to go back to cooking, but he lost the drive to be a determined artist. He said it was too hard to see me doing something easy like porno while he went and cooked in a competitive and fast-paced kitchen for twelve hours a day. We compensated for some of his lost chef dreams by becoming patrons of four-star restaurants.
Desiree and I got ready together. She wore an elegant strapless black dress. Her skin and tits looked great in it. I’ve always been a fan of small chests. My dress was black, too. It was too sexy for the place we were going. The middle was cut out of the side and it had one strap. It was a stripper dress. I made it work with a long, thin coat. Tyler wanted me to wear the dress. He picked it out because it was hot. I often turned to him for style tips because I could never go sexy enough. Clothes I chose were too plain, not fitting for a girl in porn.
Tyler went next door to Oliver’s apartment to wait for us to get dressed. He probably wanted to do a couple lines and see what Oliver had to drink. Desiree shut the door behind Tyler as he left. She locked it and looked at me. Desiree confided to me that she and Oliver had fucked the night she stayed over at his apartment and that she didn’t want to hang out with him on her last night here. I told her we would do whatever she wanted and that I was sorry for what had happened. All of a sudden, and way too late, I felt protective of this girl. She’s only seventeen! I fumed. What a creep! I felt naïve for being so blind. Oliver seemed so harmless. I never thought anything would happen between them. Oliver was supposed to be engaged to a girl back in Boston. He acted too uptight to fuck an underage girl. Tyler couldn’t know. I wasn’t going to tell him while Desiree was still staying with us. If she wanted to, then that was her business. Desiree was his responsibility more than mine, but I played my part. We fed her drugs and booze. Then she got fucked by the twenty-seven year old neighbor. What else could Tyler and I possibly do to help corrupt this girl?
Our reservations were at eight, but we arrived late. Just like with porno jobs, Tyler would continually make us late for dinner. We ordered caviar and wine to pair with the tasting menu. The sommelier came to our table. He was absolutely gorgeous. Desiree and I gawked. It was so hard to take our eyes off him. The man was tall, black-haired, blue-eyed, and impeccably dressed. He also knew everything about wine. Tyler made fun of us for being so adolescent. He didn’t get jealous. It was too great of a night for him to act like an asshole. He didn’t get wasted or embarrass us. It was lovely.
The sommelier asked Desiree her name and sat down with us for a glass of wine, on him. The four of us chitchatted, and for once not about pornography. Desiree told him she was twenty-four and in town for one last night before she would be going home to Houston to finish college. It was a pretty good story, and he bought it. Meth teaches people to tell a decent lie, the addict’s survival instinct. Our party migrated to The Standard downtown for some drinks. Tyler and I thought nothing of the flirtation going on between Desiree and the sommelier. I didn’t think it would go any further than a make-out sessio
n at the bar. Part of me was envious that she got to flirt with the sommelier and I didn’t. The thought of having a four-way wasn’t a possibility, because of the whole brother/sister thing. We were unconventional, but we were not sickos. I had to live vicariously through Desiree as the sommelier persistently came on to her. I died for her inside.
The night couldn’t go on forever. Tyler had a shoot the next morning without me. Desiree wanted to stay the night with the sommelier, even though she was still on her period. He’d invited her up to his downtown loft nearby.
“Please? Can I? I promise I’ll be back early tomorrow morning. Please, Scooter?” She looked up at him with batting eyes and clasped her hands together, begging.
Tyler let her go.
“I can’t believe you think it’s okay for her to just go with some strange guy! We don’t even know him. What if something happens to her?” I was shocked that he didn’t worry at all. I didn’t want to think of anything bad happening to her, but I couldn’t help it. I’m a big worrier. At least Oliver was someone we knew.
“She’s fine. You have no idea. Desiree is a smart girl. She can take care of herself better than most girls twice her age. She wants to go. It will make her happy. Don’t worry so much,” he shrugged.
“He doesn’t know her real age.” Visions of her never coming back flashed in my brain. The phone calls we would have to make to her mother.
We left The Standard without her.
Before seven in the morning the next day, she walked through our apartment door. She sat down on the corner of our bed and looked dreamily out the window.
Tyler and I were in a cab going to the airport. Our flight was leaving for Paris. We were going to make it with plenty of time to spare. It was crazy at LAX, ever since 9/11. I was so nervous. Someone asked us for our tickets and passports. Tyler reached into the shoulder bag I’d put all of our important documents in. Everything was supposed to be in the front pocket. “Ori, where are the tickets?” He moved things around in the bag.