by Oriana Small
“What can I do, I’m not the one on vacation. He is. I wasn’t invited.”
“Come with me to Vegas! I want to take you to see Duran Duran! I got tickets for this weekend. They’re my favorite band. What do you say?”
“I don’t know. I mean, Tyler will get mad if I go with you. He’ll be jealous.”
“Fuck him! Look at what he’s doing to you right now. He should be jealous. You don’t need to worry about him. He’s on vacation with someone else. You just worry about you right now. Say yes, come on.”
“Okay.”
I called Tyler and told him about the plan. He hesitated, then said, “I’m sure you’ll have a good time. Kris’s a really great guy. I’m happy for you.” Nothing in his response was heartfelt. He sounded sad but resigned. I yearned for him to fill with jealousy and beg me not to go, crying that he still loved me, that he was a fool to leave me and that he was coming home immediately, but it didn’t happen. There was no way Tyler would tell me not to go with Kris—he wouldn’t cancel his own affair.
At the time all I wanted to do was numb the pain. I loved Tyler, and it hurt to have us end up like this. Jealousy was new to me, and it consumed me. I was sick from it. Jealousy flu. A fever that I couldn’t bring down, and it was cooking up my brain. It poisoned me, deep in my soul. I couldn’t get rid of it. Every time Tyler came into my thoughts, the jealousy rolled into my head in a toxic smog.
I called Tyler in Florida again from the Las Vegas hotel room. Kris and I were already doing coke not two minutes after we set our bags down. I told Tyler I was happy and to have a good time with his tramp without me. I told him Kris was taking really good care of me. My anger was so deep that it seeped out of my every word. No amount of drugs could mask my true feelings about what was happening.
Kris had had the trip planned for weeks. I don’t think he ever had a doubt in his mind that I would be coming with him. We went out to clubs, the Duran Duran concert, restaurants. He gave me money to gamble with and let me try GHB. We sniffed cocaine all weekend and had terrific sex. Kris swept me up and away. By the end of the three days, I was in love with him. He was in love with me, too. His sensitivity was electric compared to Tyler’s disconnection. Far away from my crumbling, heartbreaking relationship, high in a fancy hotel room in the desert paradise, Kris was a new Prince Charming. My old one was a toad fucking some frog on my dime somewhere in Miami.
Things were tense when Tyler and I returned home from our separate vacations. He started staying out all night without calling me. There were more girls like Trixy. He went on actual romantic dates with other porno girls, while still calling me his girlfriend. I was his girlfriend, but he dated anyway, regardless of how I felt about it. He took a known industry prostitute to dinner for her birthday.
“Her real name’s Billie Rae, and she’s really cool,” he told me. He stayed out doing coke with her all night. I tried to remain calm. “She and I totally started talking about our childhoods. I told her about my mom and real dad. She opened up to me about her father. He used to force her to have sex with him.”
“Tyler, why are you telling me all of this?”
“You know how everyone starts talking about deep stuff as soon as you do a couple lines. I feel like you would like her. We really connected.” This is how Tyler justified taking this girl to the Water Grill, for her birthday, just days before my own.
Shortly after my twenty-second birthday—which he forgot—I told Tyler to move out. He’d stayed out doing speed with some whore named Lucky and didn’t come home all night. It was the final straw. I couldn’t take being so insignificant any longer. Tyler fell apart, crying and yelling, “We’re going to be together forever, and get married! Ori, please! Don’t do this! We can work it out! Say that you love me!”
We bawled and fought all night over breaking up. He didn’t want to, and I did. Tyler was convinced that if he got in my face every second that went by it would convince me to change my mind. Every move I made, he was there, holding me by the shoulders and forcing me to face him and look him in the eye. I still loved him, but I couldn’t forgive him. We fell asleep on the floor of our bedroom, exhausted. When we woke up the next morning, Tyler got up and went looking for an apartment. I loaned him eight hundred dollars to make the deposit on his own place. I thought, now he can date all these other whores and not have to parade it in front of my face. I was happy for him. I was free to see other guys. This was a huge benchmark in my adult life.
I put some tacky blonde highlights in my hair to signify a new beginning. My porno career was flying. A company paid me to shoot in Prague that summer. I bought some fancy new luggage and flew to the Czech Republic, all on my own. I felt like the most independent and successful young woman alive. It just so happened that Kris was shooting there, too, on a different assignment during the same week. I stayed in Prague for seven days. Kris picked me up at my chaperone’s house and we roamed the city. We went to the opera and did sightseeing. Like cinematic lovers, we held hands and kissed in the middle of the cobblestone streets. The time we spent in Prague shooting porno movies felt more like the workings of a romance novel. It felt like Kris and I were just meant to be, that circumstance brought us together for a reason. It felt like fate.
It was easy for me to read too much into it. I didn’t look at the whole picture. I fell in love with Kris too quickly. Tyler was still a fresh, deep wound. I didn’t have a clear enough head to accurately evaluate my feelings for Kris. I see it all now, as it really was, years later. Kris was Tyler’s friend. Kris cheated on his own girlfriend to be with me. I chose not to see that Kris was a cheater—or that I was, too. Kris and I justified it by kidding ourselves that Tyler was the only one who did wrong. I feel ashamed now, but at the time it made sense.
I returned from Prague only to go on a jaunt to Mexico with Kris, strictly a romantic getaway, not intended for work or revenge. The whole time, we condemned Tyler for being such a liar. I was too caught up feeling sorry for myself to realize how hypocritical this point of view was. Kris officially asked me to be his girlfriend on his thirty-eighth birthday. We had just returned from Mexico and were having dinner at the Water Grill. I was doing to Tyler exactly what he’d done to me. I’d convinced myself that Kris and I were different. We were actually falling in love. It was real and dreamlike at once. Kris was decadent and wooed me, showering me with attention and affection. I saw no flaws in him—then.
Tyler started doing heroin. Getting his own place turned out to be the exact point at which his life started to go rapidly downhill. Drugs had already been a daily staple, like water and air; as a couple, we functioned a little better on them. Without me to care for him, Tyler was too fucked up all the time. I’d always made sure the bills got paid, the clothes were washed, the toilet paper bought, etc., and Tyler could not fend for himself. None of his new girlfriends took care of him like I did.
I was, and am, very scared of heroin. I’ve never done it. Because my mom’s a junky, I’ve always been afraid that if I do it one time, I’ll be hooked. There’s too much risk of addiction in my DNA to play around with heroin.
Tyler started with Vicodin and OxyContin before turning to heroin. Over the course of a couple months his new apartment transformed into a junky hangout. He dated a few druggie porn chicks before settling with one main one. They got a dog, which they never took care of. They let it piss and shit all over the floors, let it eat garbage. Heroin makes you cease to care about anything except getting a fix. It’s not like speed or coke—it doesn’t make you want to get up and clean things and be proactive.
Fulton, Tyler’s downstairs neighbor and a mutual friend of ours, called me up and told me about Tyler’s new habit. Fulton had had his own drug problems. He told me he saw Tyler using needles.
“Are you sure they weren’t for steroids?”
“No, he’s shooting H. He’s a mess.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I wept. This wasn’t what I wanted for Tyler, no matter how bitter I
was.
“You should talk to him. He’ll listen to you. He still loves you. Just come over, now.”
The neighbor let me in the locked gate to the apartment complex. I was nervous. I didn’t want to be there, near Tyler’s new whore or anyone else who might be living in his apartment. I knocked, and Tyler opened the door. He was shirtless as usual and in designer jeans. Smoke billowed out of the open door. He was surprised and smiled at me. It wasn’t Tyler’s normal, gleaming Colgate smile. His eyes were only half open and his face was pale and saggy.
“I need to talk to you. Come here. Come outside with me.” I was stern, but I could not stop the tears that welled up in my eyes.
It was like he was sleepwalking. “I just got up,” he said. It was past four in the afternoon.
“Tyler, what are you doing?”
“I was partying last night and I couldn’t wake up this morning. What’s the big deal? Don’t act so perfect. You do the same thing.”
Yes, but I wasn’t the one looking like a malnourished albino. Tyler had lost at least fifteen pounds since I last saw him. He looked like he hadn’t seen daylight or a tanning bed in months. However, he did have a nice haircut. At least there was one thing I never had to worry over with Tyler. His hair always looked perfect.
“Tyler, are you doing heroin? Because if you are, I am really, really fucking mad at you. You know your real father and my mom are junkies. Their lives are fucked up because of it! Please, Tyler, don’t do it.” My screaming voice bounced off of the sides of the buildings in the middle of his apartment complex.
“Shhh! I’m not! I’m okay, please. Don’t worry. I am partying a little too much, but I’m fine. I’m working and I’m trying to get my shit together. Please.”
“Do you promise me?”
“Yes. I’m fine. I miss you. A lot.”
“I miss you, too.”
We stammered on and on with half-hearted sentiments: I wasn’t happy, and neither was Tyler, since we’d split. We were happier together. Maybe we could have worked it out. Maybe Tyler just needed to get his whoring out of his system. I just couldn’t say the truth. I was a jealous bitch who would never be able to get past his indiscretions. The reality was that I had a new boyfriend and was way too involved with him to turn back. Tyler looked at me with sad, tired brown eyes. He still made my heart sink when I looked up at them.
I asked, “Do you have any of the money you said you would pay me back?”
“Oh, yeah. I wanted to pay you a big chunk of it, but I just haven’t been able to. I don’t have it right now. I’m going to pay you, though. I mean it.”
He may have meant what he said, but he didn’t act on it. The longer he took, the angrier I grew. The money was important to me now. I was still spending at least a thousand a week on coke, just for myself. All of my spending habits had gotten out of hand since we’d broken up. I went out every night and shopping every day. After Prague, my porno work started slowing down. I started to panic about how I was going to keep it all up.
Kris and I were in my bedroom, sitting on the floor. We had the coke plate lying on the carpet with us. I did line after line, trying to figure out how I was going to pay Tyler’s five hundred dollar phone bill, which was in my name.
“What can I do? There’s no way for me to make him pay it. He shouldn’t just be able to get away with it.” I wiped some excess powder off the end of my nose and reached for my vodka tonic.
Kris said, “You should file small claims against him. My friend did it and she got a judge to order payment for her case. It was easy. You just go down and file. And it’s cheap, too.” I took his advice and filed a small claims suit against Tyler. All it required was thirteen dollars and a drive to the Van Nuys Courthouse. Another friend suggested I contact Judge Judy. I went to the website but didn’t find any information about how to contact the show. It seemed too far-fetched anyway.
Then, two days after I filed the claim, I picked up the phone at home and it was a producer for the Judge Mathis Show in Chicago. She somehow knew I had recently filed a suit and asked if I would like to come on the show for a ruling. I couldn’t believe it. The producer said that she could have me on in a month. When I told her that Tyler and I were porn stars, she told me she could book us in a week.
The producers took the courtesy of calling Tyler and telling him that he was being sued. He would never have consented to going on television to air his dirty laundry if they hadn’t mentioned they would pay the settlement of the case. If he lost, the money wouldn’t come out of his pocket. He was sold because he knew he would lose.
The Judge Mathis Show flew us out in less than a week. I was almost flat broke. My porno dollars were being spent as fast as I could fuck for them. It wasn’t just the principle I was after now, it was cash. My landlord, Pro Trusion, was kicking me out of the condo. He callously delivered the notice, giving me thirty days to get out. It was early November. Porno was shutting down for the holidays. I was screwed.
Thank god for this show, I thought, for saving my ass. Not only was I suing Tyler for the phone bills and the loan for his apartment deposit, but for another unpaid loan: the two thousand dollars his dishonest mother, Cheryl, had borrowed. Because Tyler had told me to give her the money or it meant I didn’t love him, it was emotional ransom. It turns out that the money didn’t even go to Cheryl’s mortgage. She used it to buy expensive gifts for her daughters and herself. I held Tyler responsible.
On the day of the show, I sat in a greenroom for the plaintiffs. Tyler was in another one designated for defendants. There was a swarm of young, talkative, attractive producers who gathered information from us. It was their job to get our stories and twist them into entertaining TV. They gossiped back and forth, telling me what Tyler was saying about me in the other room. By the time it was our turn to go on air I was exceedingly fired up and pissed off.
When I watch the tape of the show now, it’s silly. At the time, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. I was hot, ready to take the legal system by storm. My hair was freshly dyed black to get rid of those awful blond streaks. My makeup was perfect and my outfit was a new cream-colored suit jacket and miniskirt from Bebe. I thought I was something else. Tyler surprised me by wearing slacks and a slightly wrinkled jacket. I expected a dirty tee shirt and jeans. His eyes were barely open. There were soot-colored circles underneath them.
Tyler had brought his new junky girlfriend as a character witness for the show. It was the first time I ever saw her. She was a mess. Her hair was clipped cheaply in a bun and had obviously not been brushed for days. She wore a baggy hooded sweatshirt and jean skirt. The outfit was not what you should show up to court in unless you wanted to say, “I don’t really give a fuck about anything.”
Tyler and I both had a chance to plead our stories to the Honorable Judge Mathis, who started the proceeding by asking, “You all real freaks, or do you just play the role?”
“He started to fall in love with girls that he would do scenes with!”
“We did stuff off camera, before we even started. We were crazy!”
“In our business, you have the opportunity to make a lot of money. And he chooses to spend it on drugs instead!”
“She partied her ass off, too! Oh, sorry, Your Honor. She partied a lot.”
The porno, the women, the parties, and the love story, all summed up for the man before he deliberated. It was a joke. Everyone looked foolish. Fortunately, I was used to doing way more outrageous things on camera for money. Being on a mainstream television program yelling at my ex-boyfriend is actually one of the tamest moments in my video history.
The ruling was in my favor. I was awarded the sum I’d loaned Tyler, plus what he owed for the phone bill, but not the two thousand dollars I loaned to his mother. Mathis said I had to sue Cheryl directly to get that back. Fat chance. She lived in Texas, and I was never going to go back there. I didn’t see Tyler or his girlfriend after our appearance. It was several months before I saw him on a set, then yea
rs went by before I saw him again.
The last time I saw Tyler was at a bukkake shoot in 2006. I was there to mix up a bowl of cum in a blender for another girl to drink. I didn’t even touch a cock that day, just mixed the seed feed. Tyler was one of the sixty guys present to jack off into the bowl. There is no lower you can go in porn than bukkake guy. I was shocked to see the person I used to be in love with look so terrible. He was weathered, the constant drugs and hard living having caught up to him. It was extremely sad. I was high on coke and drunk when I got to the scene. When I saw him, I was too numb to feel what I truly felt for Tyler. I was sorry for my own share of the dealings when we broke up. Perhaps I hadn’t acted as compassionately as I could have because I was in my own downward spiral. We were still a lot alike, but somehow I was getting away with it. Tyler had begun to pay the price. My penance was still on its way.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ass Cream Pie
AFTER my appearance on the Judge Mathis Show, I moved out of the condo in Tarzana. I found another apartment in Hollywood, right at the bottom of the hills. Technically, it was in Hollywood Hills. I was going to be much happier there, living alone, but it would take some time. Until then, I’d never lived alone in my life. I looked at Pro Trusion’s sudden eviction as a blessing in disguise. Living in the place that Tyler and I once shared was too painful, even after I’d taken in a roommate. It was time to move on, geographically and otherwise.
But moving couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was on the latter half of my second year in porn and the job offers had come to a halt. I’d left Nelson and Hannah’s agency, and things were slow. It was the holiday season and nobody was shooting. I could barely pay my new rent and deposit. The savings account I’d started for my porno money was empty. In addition to the rent, I had to buy Christmas gifts. Car payments and insurance didn’t go away either just because the porn industry gets slow. Soliciting myself to directors and producers was never my best quality. I’d had Nelson to do that for me for over a year. Then we had a final argument on the phone and came to the conclusion that I would move forward alone. I was happy about it. Nelson, already a tyrant, was turning into a cold-hearted pimp. I couldn’t handle fighting with him anymore, especially over the people I would fuck, and for how much.