Girlvert: A Porno Memoir (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

At the Ritz

H
annah
came over one night before I was to leave for Hawaii. Kris was at my place, too. He and I were all packed and prepped to spend a week at a resort on Kauai. Hannah said she’d house-sit, make sure my kitty had some company. Kris was sweeping me away on this luxurious vacation to win me back from Alan.

The whole thing reeked of misgivings. I wasn’t sure about getting back with Kris. He still wanted to marry me, but he remained as condescending as ever. He brought the ring to put back on my finger. It was too hard to let go of Kris no matter how ominous it all felt, and, worse, to let go of Alan. I was going to leave on this trip and deal with Alan’s feelings when I got home. If there were a more selfish way to go, believe me, I would have found it.

Kris kept saying rude things to Hannah. He told her that her middle name, Claire, was a “fat girl’s name.” I realized that he was trying to make a
Breakfast Club
reference, but Hannah had never seen it. She was struggling with her weight at the time, so it was clearly a hurtful thing to say. Kris put me down in front of Hannah, too. He was listing off things that I couldn’t do well and arguing with me about them. I was a bad cook, bad driver, bad pet owner, and a legendary gossiper. He went on and on. I would look over at my best friend during his tirades, and she stared back at me. Hannah and I wedged ourselves into my big, white couch. Kris went to bed, finally. He expected me to go and cuddle with him. If he hadn’t offered to take me on a trip to Hawaii, I would have told him to get lost. He was just another bad addiction for me. He gave me a brief high, but the comedown was not worth it.

“What am I going to do?” I whispered to Hannah.

“Babe, you don’t have to go on this trip if you don’t want to. You don’t have to marry him.” Tears were in her eyes. No one else had the sympathy for me that Hannah did.

We smoked and drank vodka until the sun came up. Kris began stirring at six. He walked out of my bedroom and I told him I wasn’t going to Hawaii.

“You
are
going with me.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t go with you. I can’t marry you. Please just leave, Kris.”

“Fine! That’s just fine, Ori. You’ll never have someone as good as me, or who will love you as much as I do. Good luck in life, Ori. Have fun finding someone who will take care of you! Give me back my ring.”

I threw the ring. Kris picked it up off the tile floor of my tiny kitchen. He had his hand on the front door when he bent down to get it. Before he flung it open to storm off, he shot off a menacing grin. Throwing the ring really pissed him off, but he knew he couldn’t grab me and shake me in front of Hannah. I wasn’t afraid. It was all over. All he could do was lift the cat litter box and dump it upside down on my kitchen floor. Then he reached into my purse and snatched two hundred dollars and the pair of Armani sunglasses he’d bought me.

The door slammed harder than it ever had before. I’m sure Kris was trying to break it. He was gone. There was a mess of clear crystal cat litter on my floor. My apartment was a wreck of empty beer bottles and coke plates, but there was peace.

“I did it,” I breathed, happily.

“What should we do now?” Hannah said.

The only thing that made sense was to do some ecstasy.

Our friend Haywood came over. Haywood was a handsome friend of mine that we randomly called on to party. It was only eight in the morning, but Haywood was up for anything. We called a limo to pick us up. It drove us to a liquor store, then to the Ritz-Carlton in Marina Del Rey. I booked a room with an ocean view. I was determined not to be depressed over Kris. I’d met Haywood through Kris. We’d spent Thanksgiving at his house with another group of porno people, doing coke and cooking a turkey. Haywood was the source for any drug you could imagine. Kris envied him because of his connection with Hollywood celebrities. I had no interest in doing drugs with famous people.

On the way to the Ritz, Lindsay, another girl I knew from porn, called. She and I had met at a Hustler Casino bikini competition. She was a really pretty redhead with dangerous curves. Her curves actually got too dangerous. When I’d last seen her, at a bar in Venice, her hipbone was sticking out far enough to poke someone’s spleen out. Skeletal skinny. Most hardcore tweakers pick their faces, but Lindsay’s skin was flawless. Within a couple of hours we transformed a horrible morning into an upbeat party. Haywood brought a projector that spun a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors onto the ceiling. We drank champagne and ate ecstasy pills. There were a couple of huge mounds of cocaine sitting out on hotel plates. The music was good indie rock that I couldn’t put a name on. The ocean breeze swept into our room through the open balcony door.

The pills I swallowed were beginning to take effect. I was in my blue Calvin Klein swimsuit I’d bought for Jamaica. It was a little past midday and the sky was a gorgeous blue. My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the 818 number, so I picked it up joyfully. If it was Kris trying to sneak a call from someone else’s phone, I wanted him to know I was having a fantastic time without him.

“Hello,” I sang.

“Hi, Oriana. This is AIM Healthcare. I’m calling to let you know that your gonorrhea test came back and it’s positive. Can you come in and get medicated today?”

“What? I’m positive for gonorrhea.” I said it loud enough for my friends to hear. “But I haven’t done any scenes this month…”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know…but you’ve got to come in and get medicated. Can you come today?”

“No, I’ll have to come in another day. Thank you.” I hung up my phone.

“AIM?” Hannah sat down on one of the beds next to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

“I have gonorrhea. But the last scene I did was a month ago. The only person I’ve fucked is Kris.” I’d contracted STDs plenty of times, but always from other performers. As far as I knew, I never caught a disease from a personal encounter. Kris had given it to me. He’d told me he wasn’t fucking anyone else, including for work. We had a pact.

I was going to have to call Jeff at JM and tell him my scene for him that week would have to be postponed. Nothing could prepare me for how pissed off Jeff would get. He already had anger management problems.

He screamed at me on the phone. “What the fuck do you mean you have gonorrhea? I pay you six thousand dollars a month and you don’t even do any fucking scenes for me! You’re fired. I am so fucking angry I can barely talk right now.” I could picture his eyes rattling in their red sockets.

“Kris gave it to me. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

Jeff breathed fire into the receiver. When I couldn’t stop crying, he hung up.

Around this time, I’d also wrecked the BMW JM had paid for. I didn’t tell Jeff, but I did tell Sandy. It was the second time I had done it, and it was my fault in both instances. I’d been driving a rental around for over a month because the whole front end of my car had to be rebuilt.

Jeff told me I’d better get to AIM and “take the fucking medicine” and get retested. As I put down my overworked cell phone, the sun was going down. We had a lovely sunset from our balcony at the Ritz-Carlton.

Alan had also been calling me. He knew I might have been in Hawaii with Kris and was overjoyed to discover that I hadn’t gone. He wanted to see me. My friends sat around and tried to comfort me. The drugs were not working as well as they used to. I’d done a good job of surrounding myself with ways to ease my pain, but now it was all totally useless. Everything came from inside. There was no escape.

Back at my apartment, everything was exactly as we left it; empty bottles, cigarette butts on the tops of beer cans, magazines and papers strewn around on the carpet, the cat litter on the kitchen floor.

The movie I had to postpone was
Girlvert 10
. When the infection cleared up, I was freshly fueled to turn the plot of this porno into a full-on ex-boyfriend bashing. I renamed a character Krass and fucked him in the movie. At the end of the video the Girlvert finds out she has contracted gonorrhea from her boyfriend Krass.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Obscenity

I
had
learned nothing from my mistakes.

The same problems that I constantly had were still prevalent in 2006. It was my fourth year in the porno business, and I was stuck. The sinkhole was formed of my own muck. Cocaine use was still number one on my list of priorities. I spent all of my cash on my rent and coke. All of my credit cards were maxed out. I only made the minimum payments. I was making less money now that I was no longer featured on
Night Calls Hotline
. It was cancelled, and there was really no other spot on the network for me. After all of my effort to be thin enough and sexy enough, I was not chosen for a new show. JM paid me over six thousand dollars a month, and I was living paycheck to paycheck. I started stripping to pay for my constant auto repairs. I’d wrecked my silver BMW convertible for a third time. I paid the owner of the car I hit two thousand dollars so he wouldn’t sue. I was drunk and driving down Sunset Boulevard in rush hour traffic.

The owner of the car said he smelled alcohol.

“Oh, no. I’m not drunk! What you’re smelling is this,” I smiled, reached into the door of my car, and pulled out a bottle of Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue perfume. “It’s the fragrance I’m wearing. It smells like Absolut Citron. See?”

I sprayed it on my wrist and gave him a whiff. I was luckier than hell that he didn’t call the cops. Later, he called me up and asked for money. I thought it would be easier to pay him off than to deal with my insurance again.

When it came time for my two-year anniversary with JM I debated asking for a raise. But my self-worth was yet again floating in the bottom of the toilet since leaving Playboy. I felt like all of my scenes sucked, that I was a washed-up, has-been performer. My lack of confidence in my efforts for the JM movies was like a layer of lead paint all over my body. I felt like box-cover poison. I did not feel hot anymore, I felt like a dinosaur, like my body was getting flabby. I needed to exercise more! Be more of a whore in the scenes! This is what I told myself in order to dodge the inevitable. Ever since the day I walked into World Modeling, people had told me there was going to come a time when I wasn’t the hot, young thing anymore, and that I would have to accept it.

But it was more than all of this that had me down. I was also soon to be judged obscene by the state of Arizona and the federal government.

That summer, JM Productions was charged by a federal grand jury and indicted on four counts of obscenity. This wasn’t the first time that the authorities went after JM. The City of Los Angeles had charged JM with obscenity before and lost. JM beat the local system in 2000.
Liquid Gold
(girls peeing) and
American Bukkake
(men ejaculating) would not be censored. This time, the charges were much more serious. Federal. Four different movies were accused of being too obscene for the public:
Gag Factor 18
,
Filthy Things 6
,
Gag Factor 15
, and
American Bukkake 13
. Jeff turned himself in so that he could be released on bail. He was indicted on behalf of JM for all counts. Jeff told me that sitting in federal jail is much different than county jail. In county jail, the guys talk a lot. Faced with federal charges, the inmates are silent. No one speaks a word about what they might have done. The attitude is much more somber.

Sandy had been telling me for months that some day the government would step in. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Porno was legal. How could the government just come in and say that what we were making was obscene? The situation was scary. I was in
Gag Factor 15
. In my scene, I dressed up as an Iraqi soldier and we reenacted a situation at Abu Ghraib, only this time the Iraqi prisoners face-fucked me for revenge. Was I guilty of contributing to obscenity?

Everything seemed to be in jeopardy. Not just my job at JM, but the entire industry of porn as well. Was the federal government against the porn industry? The answer seemed to be yes. But there didn’t seem to be a clear logical explanation for why these four JM movies in particular had been picked to be deemed obscene. I’d done much more violent and degrading sex scenes than the ones in
Gag Factor 15
.
Service Animals 10
was something I did in 2002. That movie was more abusive than a
Gag Factor
movie ever could be. So were
7 The Hard Way
and
Clusterfuck
.

What makes certain movies bad and others okay? Why just
American Bukkake 13
, and not the entire series? Why was JM Productions singled out? Their movies were comedies. Sure, all of them had little plots which centered around the degradation of women and hardcore sex, but the girls were paid and they weren’t complaining. Jim made everyone laugh during the sex. We had fun making this stuff. Perceptive ability should tell you that these flicks were sex comedies. We were
actors
. The
Gag Factor
series is all about sloppy and rough blowjobs. The girls’ heads are upside down while they are face-fucked. It’s a fantasy sequence for men to get off on. You have to be really willing and able to want to do that—it’s a
job
. I’ve done it many times. My face was covered in my own vomit, drool, and snot, and it was hard to just stay still and let it run down into my mouth and eyes. It’s part of the effect, for the scene. It is a porno video and people are watching. It was my job to keep up the act, and that’s exactly what it is, an act.

When I found out that Jeff was in trouble, I was worried. We had our differences, but I never wanted anything bad to happen to him. The thought of him picking up trash on the side of the freeway in an orange vest may have brought a peculiar little smile to my face, but I didn’t want him to go to prison. The feds took his passport away, and he was told to not leave the city limits without verifying it with the police. When he spoke to me on the phone, his voice had electricity in it. He was high on the adrenaline. I can’t imagine what was going through his head. He was still serving out a court order to attend anger management classes. He’d had legal problems since he’d smashed one of his customers’ desks in with a baseball bat. He emitted negativity.

The reasons leading up to the indictment didn’t seem adequate enough to put someone in prison for five years. JM had manufactured and sold their allegedly obscene material to a distributor named Five Star DVD. Five Star then sold the DVDs to a store in Arizona. The lawmakers in intolerant Arizona filed the charges. It was a federal case because the product had been shipped over state lines. Obscenity laws are not black-and-white. It is up to each and every community to decide what is or is not allowed. What is obscene in Los Angeles is not necessarily obscene in San Francisco. But everything is considered obscene in Arizona. The definition of the word obscenity includes: indecency, immorality, smut, lewdness, crudeness, vulgarity, dirtiness, dirt, filth, coarseness, crudity, profanity, eroticism. All open to interpretation.

Jeff faced the charges honorably. He may have been considered an asshole by most people, but he did deserve respect for what he stood for. It wasn’t just Jeff going on trial. All of our porno lives were in jeopardy. If Jeff didn’t fight the good fight, we all would lose. If his porn movies were deemed obscene, whose were going to be next? The censorship might not even stop at porn. Basic personal freedoms of speech and expression were at stake. Jeff was going to be pleading his case to defend the rights of us all.

We were just being creative, same as in other art forms. It’s not right to censor artistic expression. An obscenity charge applied to pornography would inevitably spread to other forms of art. It terrified me to think of the government restricting my mind, my body, and my creativity. I can only speak from my own experiences. By no means am I an expert in obscenity laws, but vulgarity is not a universal concept. Obscenity is an opinion. It is as much of an opinion as gauging rudeness. What we think is taboo now will probably be in fashion in the near future anyway. A hundred years ago, women couldn’t even show their ankles in public without being considered obscene. When it comes to pornography, it’s fair to suggest that a viewer should know what to expect. If you don’t want it, don’t watch it. I don’t know why anyone would find it necessary to protect the average pervert from a dirty movie.