The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (26 page)

Mark still had a lease with a house outside of town, so we used it for a few shoots while we looked for someplace more convenient and a little less obvious. It was more or less the same arrangement as Lake Mead. We’d buy groceries and retreat to the house for a weekend, being as self-sufficient as possible so we didn’t attract too much attention, not coming out until we had at least a few films in the can.

But during one of our visits, we pulled into the driveway and noticed that there were some unfamiliar cars parked nearby. I immediately suspected the worst, assuming that Como or Navarro must be waiting for us, ready to bust us the moment we walked inside.

I snuck around the side and peeked through an open window. There were women cleaning the kitchen, and the strong odor of ammonium was unmistakable. Well, I thought, this can’t be right. Mark wouldn’t have been stupid enough to hire a maid on the very weekend we were scheduled to shoot a film.

We drove to the nearest phone booth, and I called Mark in Indiana, explaining that the house appeared to be occupied by a rogue cleaning service.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“You’re damn right it doesn’t,” I barked at him. “Please tell me you paid the rent on this place.”

I waited while he checked his records. “Aw hell,” he said. “You’re right. We didn’t renew the lease.”

“God
damn
it, Mark!”

“My secretary forgot to remind me. Wow, buddy, I’m sorry about that.”

Mark was a multimillionaire, and one of the richest men in adult films. But he was too busy when it came to keeping track of his own bookkeeping.

“So what do you expect me to do?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“I have a crew with me, Mark. I have actors and cameras and everything. How the hell am I supposed to shoot a goddamn film if I don’t have a goddamn set?”

“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Look to your left. What do you see?”

“Nothing.” We were in the middle of the Nevada desert, somewhere between Lake Mead and Las Vegas. There was nothing around us for as far as the eye could see.

“Okay,” he continued. “Now look to your right. What do you see?”

“More goddamn desert.”

“Look behind you,” he said. “What do you see?”

“Desert, you fucking idiot. What are you getting at?”

“That’s it!” he declared. “Shoot a desert movie!”

If he was standing in front of me, I would have strangled him with my last ounce of strength.

“Where are the actors gonna pee?”

“Ronnie, just work it out. You’ve never let me down before. I’ve gotta go now, good-bye.”

The phone went dead. There was nothing to be done. I was stranded with a van full of anxious actors and miles of white sand between us and the nearest town. But at least I had a lot of charged batteries and power packs. And I am, if nothing else, a professional. I wasn’t about to give up without a fight. We had no script for this scenario, and just a few hours of daylight left. But as Benjamin Disraeli once said, desperation can be as powerful an inspiration as genius. So with just a camera and some ballsy improvisation, we made our film. We made a film about people stranded in a desert, because that was what we knew. A group of girls run out of gas, some guys come walking by, and they all have sex. It was brilliant in its simplicity.

We had so much fun that we decided to camp out in the desert and make another film. Why make one desert movie when you can make
two
? It was easy enough; we just changed the scenario and shot the entire thing again. Instead of girls being stranded and getting saved by the guys, the guys were now looking to buy land and build homes in the desert and the girls were real estate agents. It still resulted in hot sex in the desert, so who cared about the setup?

I did a lot of these “one-day wonders” for Mark. It was probably my most inspired period as a porn filmmaker. I was forced to be creative because I didn’t have the budget or resources to make an “epic” motion picture. I was just shooting with whatever we had at our disposal and making the most of it. And once the wheels were in motion, I could just sit back and relax and, if I was so inclined, take a short nap.

It’s true; I do have a reputation for falling asleep on my sets. But this is just a sign that a movie is in good shape. When a scene is going badly, I have to be on the sidelines, whispering advice to my actors. But when everything is exactly the way I like it, I can sneak away and start snoring. I guess this is the fundamental difference between me and a real director like Martin Scorsese. If he’s doing his job right, he should be exhausted by the end of the day. If I’m doing my job right, I should wake up well rested and ready for the long drive home.

Some of my actors have taken advantage of my tendency to fall asleep during a shoot. On more than a few occasions, I’ve woken up with my nails painted pink,
*
or some obscene word written in lipstick on my forehead. Some of them have even taken pictures of me with an actor’s penis dangling dangerously close to my mouth. One of the hazards of the trade, I suppose.

John Stallion, Mark Carriere’s brother-in-law, was the smartest prankster of all. When I fell asleep, he’d get a porn star with the biggest, blackest penis—somebody like Ray Victory or F. M. Bradley—to come over and place his penis right next to my nose. Then he’d yell out, “Ron!! Hey, Ron!!” I’d wake up and they’d snap a Polaroid before I realized what was happening. Because my eyes were wide open in the picture, I didn’t have an alibi. I couldn’t claim to have been asleep.

Anyway, over a period of two months, shooting weekends only, we made more than fifteen desert movies in the time it usually takes to shoot one mainstream B movie. At one point, I got the crazy notion that we should make a science-fiction movie. We were in the desert, after all, and it could’ve passed for the rocky terrain of a foreign planet. I had Mark deliver us some dynamite astronaut spacesuits from “Western costumes,” and with only my half-baked idea to go on, we filmed a takeoff of
Planet of the Apes
called
Space Vixens
.

The story begins with a group of astronauts landing on another planet, or at least what they
think
is another planet. They take off their helmets and realize, “Wait a minute, we can breathe!” After exploring the planet, they stumble across a tribe of cavewomen, dressed in tiny loincloths and very little else. They have sex with the cavewomen, and eventually one of them figures it out.

“We’re not on some strange, distant planet,” the head astronaut tells the others. “We’re back on Earth! We…we…
went back in time
!”

It was exactly as hilarious and corny as it sounds. And as if that wasn’t enough, there were some truly spectacular astronaut/ cavewoman sex scenes. Really, what more could you ask for?

Space Vixens
is probably one of my most glorious moments in porn. It was cheap, it was easy, and it still stands up as one of the most intentionally and yet unintentionally funny comedies in the canon of adult cinema.

I never saw Sam Kinison laugh so hard as when I showed him
Space Vixens
. He was one of the first people to screen it, and his reaction was exactly what I was hoping for. He loved every last frame, every campy and overacted conceit. But Sam appreciated details that even I hadn’t anticipated.

“You worked so hard to make it look authentic,” Sam told me.

“You had real costumes, and the actors weren’t wearing jewelry or high heels or anything else that might give them away. You never accidentally shot a car or a telephone pole in the distance. But Ronnie, the astronauts are using a fucking
clock radio
to check the atmosphere.”

He paused on the scene to give me a closer look. And sure enough, there it was. The astronauts were using a device to calculate the planet’s oxygen levels—sort of a hackneyed version of the
Star Trek
tricorder—and after a far-too-pregnant dramatic pause, they said, “The machine says that the atmosphere is…like Earth.” But upon closer examination, it was clear that their seemingly intricate piece of astronaut technology was, in fact, just a standard clock radio. You could even see the clock’s cord tucked into the actor’s pants.

“Well, what do you want from me?” I yelled at Sam. “I’m not fucking Orson Welles.”

“That,” Sam said, wiping away his tears of laugher, “is painfully obvious.”

I
don’t think I understand,” I said. “Are you telling me that you don’t want to see
me
anymore or you don’t want to do
porn
?”

Tanya shrugged. “I guess it’s a little of both.”

I was sitting on our bed, watching Tanya pack the last of her clothes into an overstuffed suitcase. The bedroom was the only room left that hadn’t already been stripped clean. There were a few boxes left, piled in otherwise empty corners, waiting to be carted away. Her Brooklyn apartment had the eerie echo of a warehouse.

Actually, it
was
our apartment. It had been our apartment for two years, until today. We had both decided that the time was right to move out to Los Angeles for good. And we were going together, or at least that had been the plan. But somewhere along the way, Tanya had apparently changed her mind. About something. I still wasn’t quite sure what she was telling me.

“So you want to quit porn,” I said cheerfully. “That’s no big deal. I’m fine with that.”

She threw a shirt onto the mound of clothes and scowled at me. “But
you’re
not going to quit, are you?”

“Well, no, of course not. Why would I?”

Tanya shook her head reproachfully, like I was missing some obvious connection between the two things.

“You see, that’s why it’ll never work between us,” she muttered.

“I can’t be with anyone who’s involved in this business. It’s time to grow and move on. You’ve won plenty of awards already. We should both get out.”

The porn lifestyle can be a tough one. When you’re in what you think is a committed relationship, the last thing you want to hear your partner say in the morning is, “Okay, honey, I’m off to have sex with Seka. I’ll see you around five for dinner, okay?”

But with Tanya, I had found somebody who lived a life as unconventional as my own. She above anybody would understand that monogamy had nothing to do with my feelings for her. I could go to work and have sex with countless beautiful women, and at the end of the day I’d come home to her and be as devoted as ever. And when she made porn films, it worked the same way. I would call it emotional monogamy…physical nonmonogamy.

“So what exactly is it about porn that you have a problem with?” I asked her.

“It uses people and then spits them out the other side,” she growled.

“Since when did porn ‘use’ you?” I asked. She had hit a nerve with me. “Please tell me that you’re not becoming one of those women who blame the industry for everything they don’t like about their life.”

There were very few things that made my blood boil like a porn star playing the victim. If it was coming from some innocent Catholic high school girl, I might’ve been able to partially accept it. But Tanya was by no means innocent. Porn had not corrupted her. Even before she got into the business, she had been stripping for bachelor parties and doing things that were too wild even for me. And now here she was, pointing a critical finger at porn as if it had somehow robbed her of her sexual virtue.

The truth is,
she
had approached
me
about getting into adult films. We had met at a party in New York. She originally asked Mark “Ten and a Half Inches” Stevens about the business, and he recommended that she talk to me. Her first sex scene was with me, in Gerard Damiano’s
Whose Fantasy Is It Anyway?
And she was very, very good. She didn’t need me to hold her hand. She was a sexual dynamo, and when we did scenes together, it was a wonder our genitals didn’t spark a small fire.

And she was rewarded for her efforts. She was making upward of a thousand dollars a day, which was a huge sum even for name performers. After only a year in the biz, she was nominated for a FOXE (Fans of X-rated Entertainment) Award for best new starlet. For somebody who seemingly loved sex so much, and was paid so handsomely for doing films, she had absolutely nothing to complain about.

“So you’re just going to throw it all away?” I asked.

“This was never going to be forever,” she said, finally getting her suitcase closed. “I was only ever going to do this for a few years, just long enough to get some money saved away.”

“That’s right,” I said. “How can you say porn is bad when it’s done so much for you? It paid for your education. It allowed you to travel and take flute lessons in Florence, Italy. You were able to do a small part in
9½ Weeks
.
*
It gave you the freedom to do whatever you want to do.”

That might have been one of the reasons I had fallen in love with Tanya. She had so many interests and talents outside of porn. She played classical flute, and she was probably the best musician I’d ever known. I went to her concerts and met the other members of her chamber ensemble. When she went to Italy to study flute with the masters, I flew over to see her and to take her sightseeing. She couldn’t have asked for a more supportive and enthusiastic boyfriend.

Was that what I was? Her boyfriend? I suppose so, though we never really defined ourselves in that way. We didn’t introduce each other as “boyfriend and girlfriend.” We were just roommates or, better still, “friends with benefits.” It didn’t have the same possessive connotations that came with being a couple.

I did love Tanya, however, and I had told her as much many times. I don’t know if she realized just what a scary leap that was for me. I’ve always had a rule in relationships: never be the first one to say those words. Because once you say “I love you,” you become a slave. But with Tanya, I didn’t need to think about it. I didn’t tell her because I thought it was something she wanted to hear. I told her because I meant it, with every last cell in my body.