Girlvert: A Porno Memoir

by Oriana Small

  But only her good characteristics influenced me—gave me the balls, so to speak—to get into porn. She showed me D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin when I was a kid, and my sexual life, for pleasure and for work, has been its own poetry. My mother was open about sex, positively. And she was the life of the party. In her better days, she taught me a fun way of being, by example. Her FUCK YOU, DONT TELL ME WHAT TO DO attitude built me to be bold enough to start doing porn, and I thank her for that.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Christmas Vacation

  TYLER and I flew to Houston for Christmas. I didn’t want to stay long, maybe just a few days. He threw a tantrum when I said this, so we booked a trip for ten days. Ten days is a very long time to spend in Texas. It becomes eternal when you have to lie about the fact that you’re doing porno—and perhaps extends somewhere beyond eternity when it’s an open secret.

  Tyler’s mother, Cheryl, picked us up from the airport. From the backseat, on the way to her house, Tyler could no longer stand the secrecy. We’d only been with his mom for ten minutes, and he had to spill it to her, a nice little speech.

  “I have a little confession to make,” he blurted, smiling. “I haven’t been selling cars. Ori and I have been doing some adult movies. But don’t you worry. We really like it and we’re doing well in it. Best jobs we ever had. So, please, don’t be mad or anything. I love you.”

  I cowered in my shell like a tortoise. As bad as the lies were, I preferred them to bearing the consequences of the truth.

  Tyler’s mother listened calmly from behind the driver’s seat, eyes succinctly on the road ahead. There was a little silence as we waited for her verbal response. She sighed and said, “I know. I’ve known for a little while. Desiree told me.”

  Tyler wasn’t angry, maybe a little shocked. But I was angry. “Well, what do you think about it?” Tyler said. He was looking for some approval from his mother. I could understand that. No matter how shitty parents might be, you still want them to love and accept you.

  “Scooter, I don’t really like it. You’re an adult, and you make your own decisions. But if you’re happy, then I’m happy.”

  He was relieved. Her voice was ill-equipped for strong, maternal guidance. She just answered flatly. She wasn’t upset at us. That was all Tyler needed. But we soon found out that nearly everyone in Tyler’s family knew about it. All his cousins, aunts, and uncles. They all agreed not to tell his grandparents or littlest sister.

  Tyler’s mother acted as though she didn’t want to get her hands dirty by talking about it, this pornography business we’d gotten into. She’d had no problem asking us for two thousand dollars just a couple months prior. While Desiree was staying with us on her last visit, Cheryl called Tyler in a panic. She was going to lose her house and needed two grand right away. Tyler told me to give it to him. I hesitated, but I gave him the money, and Tyler sent Desiree home with a check. She said she’d pay it back but so far hadn’t mentioned it at all. When Cheryl told us in the car that she’d known about the porn for a “little while,” it dawned on me. She’d already known how we made our money when she asked for the loan. Not repaying it was her way of maintaining a twisted moral high ground, taking a fucked-up ethical stance. She ended up ripping us off. She ripped me off, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  Desiree apologized for outing our secret. It was okay. She was just a kid. There were no hard feelings between us. She was having a rough time. Since we last saw her she’d put on twenty pounds. On her last visit to LA, she’d filled out and looked great. Now her depression and withdrawal were showing. Meth had screwed her up, and now its absence screwed her up even more. If she couldn’t get high, all she wanted to do was eat. Eating made her fat, which only led to more sadness. The obsession I have with my own eating issues heightened my empathy for Desiree. Tyler and I wanted to help her. We took her out with us and offered to pay for a gym membership for her. We both felt guilty about her condition.

  Tyler and I only stayed with his mom, sisters, and stepdad the first night of our trip. The rest of the time, we were at his grandparents’ house. We golfed with granddad Emmett, went Christmas shopping with grandmom Naomi, and to a holiday dinner at his aunt’s house. By day, we did all of the normal stuff people do when they go home to visit for the holidays.

  By night, we made ourselves at home in Texas as much as we could. We’d bought even more coke and ecstasy than usual to stay in the Christmas spirit. Tyler and I went out into Houston every night with some of his hometown friends. Tyler’s grandparents lived in a suburb twenty minutes outside of the city. One of our many destinations was JR’s, a gay country-western bar. The first night, I didn’t have an ID with me, but since I was a woman they let me in after I paid a sixty dollar cover charge. Tyler bought pills off some dude in the bathroom. All of us swallowed a couple, and I don’t remember much from that point on. The nights in Houston blended together into one bandaged-up sock monkey.

  The order isn’t clear, but all of these things did happen during our nights in Houston: A drag queen karaoke contest going on in the back room of JR’s. Tyler almost getting into a fight outside the club. A lot of driving around high with a lot of people. A foursome that included a crazy stripper who bit me on the neck and shoulders, leaving nasty purple and red bruises on my skin. A trip to a stranger’s house to buy some more drugs.

  One night ended when we bought a couple shitty eight balls of coke from a sketchy bar dude. It was probably ninety-nine percent baby laxative. We couldn’t keep going on it. Life was troubling when it was morning at Tyler’s grandparents’ house and we were on ecstasy and had been on it all night and were supposed to be bright and shiny people at breakfast.

  “Hey, do you want to smoke this crap?” Tyler asked.

  “What, like crack? How do you do that if it’s powder?”

  “I know how to make it. I learned it from the Anarchist Cookbook. All we need is some baking soda.”

  We got up and floated to the pantry. “Grandmom? Where’s the baking soda?”

  “It’s on the shelf, next to the rice, baby.” Tyler’s grandmother was such a lovely southern lady.

  Tyler grabbed a candle from his great-grandmother’s bathroom. He mixed the coke and baking soda together in a spoon and held it over the flame to cook. We were making crack cocaine as if it were some children’s science experiment. But we did not yield rocks. Our crack balls were lumpy and wet. We sucked at the simple chemistry it supposedly takes to make crack out of baby-shit powder, and it was too goddamned funny.

  Desiree showed up. “What are you doing?” The coke was out and she saw that we were cooking something on a spoon.

  “Making crack,” I laughed hysterically. “Here, you try it!” I handed her the spoon with our works on it. She enthusiastically took the utensil and started her own batch of crack balls. They were supposed to be rocks, but every single one of ours were balls. They wouldn’t dry properly, probably because of our shitty coke.

  “Let’s smoke them!” Desiree said.

  “Out of what? How can we make a crack pipe?” I asked.

  “Out of an antenna,” Tyler said.

  “Or, with this,” Desiree said. She unscrewed a lightbulb. “I’ve smoked crystal out of lightbulbs lots of times.” She broke off the metal part very carefully. “Scooter, go get me some salt.” She poured salt into the bulb to clean off the white tint that was on the inside. When it was all clear, she dropped one of the crack balls into the broken bulb. She rolled up a dollar bill and stuck it in her mouth for a straw as she lit the bottom of her new pipe with a lighter. The crack was supposed to cook and smoke inside, but it wouldn’t. The plan was a failure.

  If we hadn’t been high on ecstasy, we would have never even thought to smoke crack, let alone try to make it. But crack had been in our minds since we’d visited Tyler’s biological father the day before. His name was Eddie and he’d just gotten out of prison for using heroin. Eddie was a very sweet, dear man. He looked exact
ly like Tyler in the face. He was much shorter than Tyler, though. I think being in a Texas prison for ten years probably shrunk him. Eddie was a sad guy.

  Until the age of eighteen, Tyler didn’t know that Eddie was his real father. The man who’d raised Tyler as his son, and even given him his same name, disowned him when he found out the results of a DNA test. The test was done without Tyler’s knowledge. One day, his father asked him to swab his cheek with a Q-Tip for medical insurance purposes. Days later, Tyler was told that he wasn’t his father’s son. His mother had lied to him for his entire eighteen years. Eddie was in prison when Tyler first found out. So, during that ten-day stay in Texas, we met up with Eddie at a billiard bar. We drank Coors Lights while Tyler tried to get to know his dad. They did their best to bond in this short amount of time. Tyler asked Eddie if we could get some coke, so we could do lines and talk over at his place. Eddie couldn’t get coke. He could get some crack. We settled for two twenty-dollar bags of crack. Each had two rocks in it.

  Eddie rented a room at his mother’s house in Houston. He had to live with her because of his parole. Eddie had been in and out of prison for over twenty years. I thought he was too good-natured to deserve prison for his weaknesses.

  I’d never bought or smoked crack before. I was freaking out. “Tyler, I don’t feel comfortable. Crack is bad. I don’t want to be here doing this.” I was scared to be in this strange house and doing drugs with a repeat offender, no matter how endearing.

  “Ori. He’s my dad! I just want to spend time with him. If he wants to smoke crack, we’ll smoke crack. Don’t be so fucking selfish.”

  Eddie was getting his crack pipe from its hiding place. It was a glass tube with a piece of steel wool stuck in the end. He pushed in the crack rock and lit it up. Tyler and his dad took turns passing the pipe back and forth. I gave in and took a couple hits. I felt scummy. And it didn’t even get me high.

  Tyler and I cried when we were done visiting Eddie. We lay down in his twin bed at his grandparents’ house and sobbed ourselves to sleep. I cried for Tyler and Eddie. I also cried for my own mother and myself. Having an addict for a parent hurts all the time, but it’s mostly a silent pain, a pain similar to carbon monoxide poisoning. It’s colorless, odorless, and can quietly fill the air around you and make you sick, gradually. We try to put it out of our minds and carry on independently, but it never stops seeping in.

  We had a few days to go before we could finally leave Texas. It was New Year’s Eve. Tyler took me out to a charming French bistro in Houston. The menu was superb. Tyler was in an especially lavish mood and explained to me in detail about all the different dishes. I had grilled fish and Tyler had a steak. We drowned ourselves in red wine. At the end of the meal, Tyler ordered champagne, two flutes of the finest the waiter could muster. A candle lit up our faces in the dark of the table.

  Then Tyler pulled out a little black fuzzy box.

  “Ori, will you marry me?” he asked, on one knee, in the middle of the room. There were tears in his eyes, and hope.

  I nodded, “Yes.” Tyler picked me up and hugged me as the restaurant cheered us on. It was a proud moment for Tyler and a spectacle for me. The little platinum diamond ring slid onto my finger. It was a perfect fit.

  Right away, Tyler called his family. “She said yes!” he shouted on several different phone calls. I watched him and cried with a smile. However, I wasn’t completely sure about it. To be honest, I had dreaded the day Tyler would do this. I didn’t want to get married to him. I didn’t have the faith in our relationship he seemed to have, even though I loved him desperately.

  Both of us agreed we wouldn’t get married for a while. I wanted to put it off as long as possible. We both needed time to grow up before doing such an adult thing like getting married.

  I was afraid of marrying Tyler because he had fallen behind me in terms of maturity. When we first met, I looked up to him. Now all I did was take care of him. He didn’t take care of me enough, and I did not think he ever would. It was wrong of me not to have had the balls to tell him this when he proposed. But we were in his hometown and staying with his family; if I’d said no, it would have been a huge drama. I knew the ring came from his grandmother. There was no way I could disappoint them all. I’ll wait until later to tell him, I thought. There was no right later time to tell him I didn’t want to get married. We returned to LA and had to pack up again to go to Las Vegas. The big porno convention was held there every year, and I was asked to attend.

  After a week in Vegas, we came home only to start packing again, but not for a trip. We said goodbye to our old Hollywood studio apartment and the neighborhood streetwalkers and relocated to Tarzana.

  For a mere fifteen hundred a month, Pro Trusion offered to rent us the same townhouse he’d choked me in. Tyler insisted we take it. I went along, once again.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Kris and Randa

  I HAD already met Kris. Kris was a photographer for hardcore sex shots and porno girls’ glamour photos. He did the stills for some teen movie I was in. He’d asked me for my phone number, and I told him I had a boyfriend. He wanted it anyway, to hire me for something to be shot for his website. I gave him the number and thought nothing more about it. Later that day, Kris called my cell while I was with Tyler.

  His voice was happy and nonthreatening. “I want to shoot you for this side project I’m doing. It’s for my website and it’s a POV blowjob scene, with me. We can do it at my house later tonight, if you can make it. I pay cash, two hundred bucks, same day.”

  My face must have gone from pleasant to disgust right away. Tyler watched me and wondered who I was talking to. “Kris? Hold on a second,” I said and clasped my hand over the receiver.

  “Who is that?” Tyler’s face was serious and his back straightened up. He was being jealous and protective, and I loved it.

  “It’s this guy that I gave my number to for work. He said he wants to shoot me tonight at his house, for a POV blowjob. He said he’d pay me in cash.”

  “Tell him no. I don’t want some guy we don’t even know having you come to his house and blow him. No way!”

  Inside my chest, my heart was melting from Tyler’s show of dominance. He’d almost always had a change of heart when cash was mentioned.

  “Hello, Kris? I’m sorry. I can’t. I don’t do POV scenes anymore. It’s too weird. If there’s anything else in the future, give me a call. Alright, take care. Bye.”

  When Tyler met Kris for himself, his tune changed. Kris was shooting stills on a set where Tyler had a gig fucking. They hit it off big time. Tyler had a new male crush. Every chance he had, Tyler would call him up to hang out or just chat. Tyler was no longer concerned about me doing a POV with Kris.

  Tyler and I stayed in a motel room with Kris and his girlfriend, Randa, when we met up to go to Coachella again. This time it was without Desiree, who stayed home in Houston. Everyone would be too fucked up to drive the three hours back to Los Angeles, so we crashed in Palm Springs for the night. At the show, we did some ecstasy and coke together in one of the electronic music tents, where Kris introduced us to Randa. She was really skinny, but not in a fashionable way. There was nothing fashionable about her. She had on baggy nylon ski pants and a tank top. Her sandals were more mountain-climber than cute. This chick did not seem like Kris’s type at all.

  Kris was six foot four and very fair. His shoulders were broad and he had long limbs. His size made him attractive. Everything on him was gigantic to me. His eyes were an arctic blue. I kept my distance. I stayed close to Tyler at all times.

  After the show, Tyler and I followed Kris’s directions to their motel on a drunk-driving journey down Highway 111. Thank god for the cocaine. The motel was called the Hotel California. It was a grimy, rundown, Spanish-style parking lot-villa that had its charm at two in the morning. Tyler was thrilled to be there with people doing drugs, people like us. Kris and Randa were older than Tyler and me. They did more drugs than even we did. Randa held out
a little bullet vial and offered it to Tyler. It was Special K. We had never done that stuff. Ketamine. But we didn’t hesitate to try it.

  Kris and Randa preached the gospel of Special K. I thought it was just used as a cat tranquilizer, but they informed me differently. It was used in hospitals, on babies, to soothe them, as well as grown people. I soaked up all of their bullshit as fast as they could dish it. We stayed up all night in that motel room in Palm Springs. The next morning, the four of us checked out, but the party wasn’t over. Randa wanted to go to a spa. She’d looked it up online at home and had the directions with her. No one objected.

  Tyler and I jumped in his new car, a brand new V8 black convertible Mustang, his dream machine. I put up most of the down payment for him, five thousand dollars. He promised he would make the monthly payments on it. I wasn’t stupid enough to cosign. Tyler was still Tyler, no matter how much porno money we made.

  Kris took a nap at the spa. He’d rented a room for half the day. He was cranky and needed to rest. He got mad at Randa for staying up and doing coke and K instead of sleeping with him. I wanted to leave as soon as possible, but Tyler was out of his mind and wanted to bond with Randa over the Ketamine. It was uncomfortable to be there as Kris’s mood deteriorated. He sulked, saturating the room with his misery. He and Randa began yelling. It was loud and clear that they had problems. Tyler and I could relate.

  After Coachella, Tyler couldn’t get enough of Kris, his new number-one guy. The three of us went to dinner and to the Zwan concert at the Wiltern. Then we stayed up and did cocaine and Special K at another friend’s house. There wasn’t a time we socialized without drugs. It was a given that we would at least be doing coke, if not more than that.