Girlvert: A Porno Memoir

by Oriana Small

  My self-esteem was burning low. I was desperate for someone to care about me for something other than my place in a sex scene. I thought that person was Kris, but I didn’t even know who I was anymore. In less than two years, I’d done over a hundred scenes. Tyler was gone from my life. I thought I’d be happier without him. Then it all started to sink in. Everything about my life before I got into the business was gone. Where were the traces of Oriana Rene Small outside of porn? I didn’t draw or paint anymore, just covered myself in cocaine and makeup.

  That December, a director from Anabolic named Marco called me. He’d called three times over the course of a few months about the same thing: He wanted me to be in his movie called Ass Cream Pies. It was a series he directed. I’d steadily declined. It was an anal movie where the girl gets fucked really hard in the butt, followed by a cum shot in the ass that she has to push out for the camera. At the very end, the guys throw cream pies in her face. The offer hadn’t been appealing to me when I had other work. Now I had nothing else. The scene paid twelve hundred dollars. When Marco called that third time, it was like he was psychic. Of course I said yes.

  I was deeply ashamed of myself for doing this movie. The shame was related to my desperation for money.

  Where had the money gone? I’d been making several thousand dollars a week, but I hadn’t saved any of it. I was a total failure with my finances. I always thought the good times would never end.

  People had warned me about getting “shot out,” meaning that everyone had shot me already and I had become old news. I routinely performed the most hardcore scenes, so no one was waiting anxiously for me to do my next anal movie as if it were a rarity. I was becoming yesterday’s porno girl. My motto getting into porn was, “I don’t care about this business or my life, it’s fucked up anyway.” That attitude helped put me where I was. I’d imagined dying young and burning out before my time, a tragic hero, a mystery. That dream never came true because I wasn’t being honest with myself. I didn’t really want to die. I did care about my life. I am fucked up, but I will probably live through it, I thought. This is what doing Ass Cream Pies was trying to tell me. If I don’t do a better job of watching out for myself, I will end up doing worse and more desperate things to survive.

  Instead of taking the job as a clear warning sign toward future disappointment, I wallowed in self-pity. The night before my shoot, I drank and did several grams of cocaine. Same old story. I blamed the porno business for tossing me aside. I’d become the jaded twenty-two year old porno star that the business had used and then tragically forgotten. That’s why I have to resort to doing such a degrading scene, I told myself. My drug-and-alcohol abuse wasn’t the problem, because it got me through such difficult times. Right.

  I showed up at the Anabolic office for makeup at 8:00 a.m. All of my coke was gone and I hadn’t slept, so I was falling asleep in the makeup chair. My nose was a crusty, red scab. I reeked of cigarettes. All of my limbs were stiff. That’s what these people deserve, I thought, a total mess. I hated the idea of this movie, so why not come to set as a zombie.

  As ridiculous as it seems to me now, the real reason I was so against Ass Cream Pies was because of the actual pies, the dessert food. Marco was a nice enough director. He always gave me compliments. The two men doing the double penetration were decent. I was used to the rough scenes that Anabolic commanded in their movies. Even the double internal pop shot was fine with me. I never thought about diseases. I didn’t worry about catching AIDS because everyone was tested. There’s a certain amount of blindness you absolutely must develop when you perform sex for a living. I’d honed that skill after doing two gang bangs with multiple guys cumming inside my ass and in my mouth. It was just a bad time for me to get pies thrown in my face. If my sense of worth had been a little higher, I would have had the humility to be able to laugh at myself. Humility and humiliation are two very different things. I didn’t see myself as human. I was a porn star. I was supposed to be sexy, period. That had become my entire identity. The crazy fun was fading and things were feeling serious. Jokes in sex scenes confused me. I felt like everyone would laugh at me and look down on me for getting pies thrown in my face, like some clown. As an object, I would decrease in value to men. I couldn’t have that happen. My value to men was everything.

  Part of the destruction of my self-esteem was slowly resulting from my relationship with Kris. He’d become my full-time boyfriend and we spent every night together at one of our apartments. Like most courtships, when we first got together I only saw his good side. We went on trips together to Cancun, Miami, and Chicago. Then, when it came time for me to get back to doing my scenes in the real world of porn, Kris showed his oppressive side. We would get all coked out the night before I had to perform, and he’d spend hours saying things like, “I just wish you didn’t have to do this. I love you. I want you to be with me, and me only. I don’t know if I can deal with this for much longer. I love you and I want you to quit, but I know you can’t. It sucks. This is hard for me. I can’t stand seeing you fuck these other disgusting porno dudes. It kills me. When are you going to start making plans? You can’t do this forever. I can’t do this. I don’t know. You’ve got to do something else soon. I can’t take it.”

  It sounds sweet, but it’s a two-way street: Kris wanted me all to himself while maintaining the right to fuck whoever he wanted on camera. Hypocritical possessiveness. Kris worked in porno, I had met him in porno, the first conversation we’d ever had was about him hiring me to suck his cock on camera. He was making me feel there was something terribly wrong with me for doing porn, a new reason to hate myself, even though it was fine for him to do so. Doing scenes started to make me sad, like I was a horrible person who couldn’t get my life together, hurting the one person who truly loved me.

  Kris wasn’t exactly trying to help me for me, or solely for our romance. He had after all hired me to fuck other guys in his own movies. But suddenly “he cared about me too much to see me do this” because of his own insecurity. Kris is one of the most insecure people I’ve ever known, and if he couldn’t get his self-esteem up, he’d whittle mine down to his level. Early in our relationship, I exuded confidence, even after Tyler had neglected me. Kris must have been attracted to that, but he somehow turned jealous along the way, and the pressure wore me down.

  I didn’t tell Kris that the scene I was going to do was for a movie called Ass Cream Pies. He would have made me feel awful about it. No way would he have found it humorous. I was too depressed about my life at the time to see the humor in any of it, but I find it funny now.

  Marco and the two male performers didn’t mind that I was wasted. Marco just laughed at me. He took the glamour stills and had to coax me into opening my eyes the whole time. He was kind. I was so out of it I couldn’t hold in my stomach or smile without grimacing. The dilapidated house we shot at belonged to Voltron, my old acquaintance from the Pissmops and Meatholes days. Voltron was drunk at 10:00 a.m., same as me. As soon as I walked in the door he handed me a Bud Light. I cracked it open with my weak, shaky fingers and chugged it down. I asked for two more cans before I went into the bathroom to do my enema.

  I hadn’t eaten in at least twenty-four hours, so I wasn’t expecting much to come out of my intestines. The bathroom was filthy. I didn’t want to spend more time in there than I needed to. There was toilet paper all over the floor. It was dark and the light bulb was yellowing, about to burn out. I didn’t see any shit on the floor, but maybe only because the light was dim. It smelled like dirty, stagnant creek water and mold. There was a disturbing absence of soap. When soap isn’t available, people who use the toilet are not washing their hands.

  Voltron owned a nicely built, Spanish-style home. He’d destroyed it. The walls were smeared with grime. The lawn was overgrown, garbage in it. The white driveway had a couple of beaten-up cars and was covered in oil stains. None of the windows were broken, nor the doors, but they had to be next. Or maybe they were replacements. In the corners o
f the living room, where we were shooting, were piles of old used baby wipes. The hardwood floors had a layer of dirt evenly distributed throughout every room. I didn’t go in the kitchen because I didn’t need to. The beer I was drinking was warm and sitting next to the front door.

  My scene started as if someone had pulled the trigger to sound a race. I was getting face-fucked by my two male counterparts, and they had a standard to keep for their company. Anabolic movies continued to have the hardest fucking known to woman. I was just a piece of warm flesh for them to pummel with their cocks. I knew the role. I was good at this.

  I have to say, when the sex was happening, I felt better. I forgot all of the cry-baby shit. Getting pounded in the ass is very empirical. I was in that moment and nowhere else. Worrying about paying my next GapCard bill was no longer necessary. All I had to do was get my brains and ass fucked out. The sex itself wasn’t what dehumanized me. It actually made me feel more of a human being, while simultaneously connecting me deeply to an animal world. The dehumanizing happened outside of the scene, at home, in the hands of the ones I loved.

  Therapeutic is not the right word—I don’t want to sugarcoat it—but it did sober me up. The men grabbed me by the hair and yanked me around during the scene. One fucked like a robot. The other actually had some talent. When I say talent, I mean that he was spontaneous. I think porno performers have talent when they bring something unique to the sex scene rather than memorizing some moves that got positive reactions in the past and doing nothing more than employing them over and over again. To be captivating isn’t a formula. You either have it or you don’t. No one can teach you how to be a standout porno star. It is way different than being good in bed. They are two completely different forms of sex.

  Marco couldn’t wait for the pies to get thrown. If I were in his position, I guess I would have been just as antsy. Voltron handed me a beer and I downed it. It wasn’t bad at all. The buildup to being made fun of was the worst part—not the fucking, but the anticipation of humiliation. I left that day with my rent money but without my dignity. I started to feel really bad when I thought about how Kris would respond to the scene. The movie would come out later, so I put off telling him about it. I would deal with his criticism then.

  You cannot hide from what you do when you’re doing porn. What I’ve done is out there for the world to view. Porno is a brutally honest job.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Performer of the Year

  JANUARY of 2004 brought me back to Las Vegas for the big porn convention and awards show. JM Productions, who’d asked me to sign autographs at their booth the year before, wanted me again. The company was run by a husband and wife team named Jeff and Sandy. I starred in several of their videos, in a series called Girlvert. I had a recurring role as the Girlvert character, an angry, abusive, young girl who forces other girls into rough sex. It’s the best work I have done in my porno career.

  Girlvert won for best continuing series at the awards show. Then, I won porno’s highest honor: The Female Performer of the Year Award. I did not expect it whatsoever. I always thought that if I ever won anything, it would have been a newcomer trophy. Instead, I beat all of the best girls in the business. I cried at the podium and couldn’t think of anything profound to say. Despite being rewarded for so ridiculous a thing—fucking—my emotions ran surprisingly high. At one time I’d been choked out, but now I was purely choked up. It was my moment for it all to seem worth it. I was the best girl in porn.

  Afterward, Sandy, Jeff, Kris, and I rushed up to our hotel rooms at the Venetian. We toasted to my enormous achievement. Kris popped open two bottles of champagne that were waiting in our room on ice. They’d all had faith I would win something, but our expectations had been blown away. However, my bright minute in the big porno sun was soon blackened. The champagne had barely made it into my glass when two friends, Fulton and Shasta, showed up at the hotel room door. They hadn’t made it to the awards show to see my big moment. They were too cracked out. Shasta was actually one of the girls I was up against for Performer of the Year.

  Here I was, trying to celebrate, and these two ghouls came haunting. Fulton always looked like he was going to die at any second. He was corpse-like, grey and clammy. The bones on his face stuck out and his eyes were sunk in. His nose ran with snot and a tint of blood. Only his unshaven stubble gave contrast to his gaunt complexion. Shasta was hanging on Fulton, barely able to stand up on her own. Black eyeliner and mascara caked her wrecked cheeks. Her nose was a bright red target in the middle of her pale white face.

  “We need to get her to the hospital! She’s really sick. I’m going to take her or call the ambulance. Can we come in and call the front desk?” Fulton was stuttering as he helped Shasta into the room.

  I took a drink of my champagne. “Sure. Take her to the hospital. I hope you’re okay.” Pissed off, I was flat when I spoke. My lack of sympathy was fueled by my inflated ego from winning the industry’s highest honor, and I wanted to bask in it for a while. They needed to get out of my hotel room if they weren’t going to participate in the celebration.

  Shasta went into the bathroom and partially shut the door. Kris and I just looked at each other. He smiled at me and I rolled my eyes. We heard a nose honk and blow out some snot. Then Shasta’s loud and obnoxious voice shrieked, “Oh shit! Dog, I’m fuckin’ bleeding! Do you have something?”

  I may have been annoyed, but I wasn’t heartless. I went into the bathroom to help her. We applied a towel to her bleeding nose. She washed her hands and I brought her a sweatshirt. It was a cherished blue Rip Curl from my cousin. Every time I put it on, I had good vibes. I wanted to send them on to Shasta so she could calm the fuck down. The night would soon be over, and all of the awards-show excitement, too.

  A month before the convention, Shasta had announced her retirement. Another boyfriend of hers was a dealer, so she didn’t need porn anymore. She and Fulton had borrowed five hundred dollars from Kris only a week before driving to Vegas. Their big scheme was to buy a kilo of cocaine and sell it to all of our friends at the different parties. They came to Vegas a few days before anyone attending the convention had arrived. Shasta thought that one of her sugar daddies had booked a room for her at Mandalay Bay. It was supposed to be “a fuckin’ penthouse suite or the presidential, dog…” She must have been delusional because no one booked anything for her. She and Fulton stayed in some economy roach motel until Kris and I arrived. In the meantime, the kilo was diminishing like sand through the hourglass. For five days straight, they consumed day and night. It was nasty shit, too, really low-grade stuff that smelled like kerosene.

  Turns out that Shasta blew out her nose. In non-druggie terms, it means her nose was terminally stuffed up, and her sinuses were infected. She also had a horrendously swollen throat. Fulton had to resort to blowing the stuff up Shasta’s asshole to get her high. Her asshole was the only unblocked passageway into her body.

  Kris let the two stay in his room. It soon smelled like a dirty hippie’s sleeping bag. Cigarette and pot smoke coated every upholstered surface in the room. Kris had to move his clothes out just to keep them from getting a contact reek.

  Upon my return to LA, I was contacted by a couple of porno columnists about my big win. One guy paid me five hundred dollars to endorse his porn star vacation package on Howard Stern. I still needed money, desperately, so I flew to New York with him. We arrived at the radio station before dawn. It was the coldest January day that New York City had seen in seventy years, and I forgot to bring a jacket. I wore lingerie under my jeans and sweatshirt. I was dead certain Howard Stern would not like my body because I wasn’t super skinny or big-busted. My figure was even on the chubby side, for me. The holidays had just passed, and I had some winter blubber to work off. What a relief it was when I didn’t get ridiculed on the air. I was quiet as possible so it wouldn’t take too long. It was being taped for the E! Channel as well. I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. I wasn’t really Howard�
��s guest; I was just this porno girl who was supposed to talk about some special trip. Nobody acted like I was important because of the award. It was a self-contained credential, relevant only in porno circles.

  I was still broke, shot out, and uncertain about what the future held. The only difference is that I had a brand new big plastic bookend that read “Female Performer of the Year.”

  Becoming a contract girl was the highest standing for a porno girl. “Contract Girl” is a title given to performers who are exclusive with one company. No one else can have you. You’re taken. That company becomes your husband or daddy, and your ass belongs to him. Contract girls are the stars of their movies. They’re on the front of the cases for all of their films and get to do all the promotional appearances. Most importantly, they don’t have to worry about where the next gig is going to come from or if there will be enough money to pay the rent. Contracted means guaranteed. You are set. Other porno girls envy you and try to emulate you in the hopes of getting a contract for themselves. Everyone in the industry admires the contract girls.

  After Vegas, Jeff and Sandy asked me to be the contract girl for JM Productions. There was no actual written document, but we had a verbal agreement that I would perform in no less than one and no more than three scenes per month. Their company would pay me a $5,500 monthly salary. They also financed a new car for me, and paid the five hundred dollar monthly installments. The car was the most exciting thing for me at the time, a blue BMW, a sports car! It’s cheesy, but I felt like I had it all. My life was the best it had ever been. I lived all by myself in my Hollywood Hills apartment. I was the best performer in pornographic movies. I was driving a BMW. I was a contract girl.