She disappeared and after he got out, while he was searching for her, I slept with him alone. He always had great drugs. He slept with a.357 Magnum under the pillow, which seemed kind of exciting to me for a while, then some remnant of common sense burst through when I heard at the bathhouse that the Hell’s Angels had a contract out on him. Then Sonny Barger, the Oakland Hell’s Angels leader, called my house to threaten him. I went back to my mother’s house in Oroville for a while to chill out. I saw him on the Bay Area tv news, talking about his wife’s disappearance through a voice processor with a mask on.
That was followed by a relationship with a fastidious hippie guy who worked for the Post Office, had been to Afghanistan (and never recovered), and could fuck like a man possessed. He was hunky but a little too chubby, with flawless auburn hair to his shoulders and a full beard. He decided to rescue me.
We’d been having polite dinners and good sex. He didn’t shoot-up and had a nice apartment in the Avenues. I never cooked at my house and there were always dirty dishes in the sink. We’d had pizza one night and had slept at my place. For breakfast I’d decided to heat the pizza and blithely turned on the oven to heat, going into the other room for a few minutes. When I returned the entire top of the stove was covered with cockroaches. Big ones, baby ones. They were jumping around on the hot stove, and were so thick you couldn’t see the top. I guess they’d been breeding in the oven.
I realized my life was grimmer than I really wanted, that maybe I had suffered enough for art, and moved into his apartment in the Avenues.
4 Tahoe
The first porno people I worked with besides the Brothers were from Los Angeles. The word around was that they were Mafia-backed. A lot of LA people came to shoot porn in San Francisco at that time because it was a lot less likely they would get busted here.
The people who “acted” in these films had a tremendous network going. I found I could call anyone who I’d worked with or even heard of and ask them about a potential employer. If someone didn’t pay at the end of the shoot, or was horrible to work with, the word spread like lightning. I had about four pages of notes listing producers’ names, and the opinions of other actors and their past experiences with them.
The first duo I worked with from LA were really sleazy. They wanted to make a ski-oriented film and were going to take the entire cast to Tahoe for a week. They also brought along a skiing coach, some camera men and the director’s dad. We got a huge house at Northstar.
The director’s dad liked to tell stories. He had been a hobo for a time and would tell about hopping freight trains and drinking sterno. I had never heard of such a thing. They would drain the fluid out of sterno cans used to heat food and mix it with Tokay grape wine. They called it Tokay and Squeezins. I couldn’t believe he was still alive.
They had asked me to shave my crotch for the shoot, which I did but the second day I had broken out with razor burn. It was hideous. It looked like prime teenage acne all over my pubic area.
When we went skiing, it was a disaster. I had not skied since I was seven years old, and had very poor balance and muscle control. My dance teachers had always called it “your neurological problem”, but it was a little more vague than that. My first time down the bunny hill I broke through the surface of a frozen-over creek and was totally drenched in ice water. The woman who played my favorite girlfriend in the film sprained her ankle and it became grossly swollen.
Our first scene together in the shower was shot the next morning around my razor burn and her ankle. Mostly I gave her head. The level of sexual excitement was so intense that everyone said they’d have to re-shoot the rest of the film to bring it up to our level. We could make each other come just by looking at each other.
We hung out together at the house when everyone else went out to the casinos at night. She had brought some heroin with her and we would smoke it and make love. It was like camp for decadent San Franciscans. I had never gotten to go to real camp because of my asthma.
On the third night there I had returned to my own bed to sleep and had a grand mal seizure. It was generally controlled by a drug called Dilantin, but I think the heroin cut right through. I woke up on the floor with a number of people I did not recognize staring down at me. I had wet my pants. I did not know where I was. It was several hours before my memory came back. The girl I had been with held me and stayed with me until I got reoriented. I had never had a seizure in front of strangers before but everyone handled it well.
I think the film was called
Here’s how I ended up with epilepsy:
I was a tremendously emotional, spoiled, asthmatic child who loved horses. I was stick thin and pale, and the floor of my room was stained from the ever-present vaporizer. My parents bought me a horse when I was ten to encourage me to be active, and to shut me up.
We found a totally wild, part-Morgan pinto mare up north in a town near Oroville called Bangor. We managed to tame her to some extent but she was always pretty crazy. She was even going over fences after about a year. I had a British ex-cavalry riding instructor who wasn’t there the day of the accident, but my father was and some visitors from LA. I was jumping a course of fences about four feet high and wearing a helmet that was not appropriate for jumping. The real “brain-bucket” style has a wide leather chin strap. This had elastic. My horse took a bad fence, caught the pole above her knees, crashed on the far side and did a somersault. I was under her at the time.
They say the saddle held her weight off me and that I was probably hit in the head by a stirrup iron. When they took me to the Children’s Hospital I was walking and talking but remembering nothing. The doctors sent me home. My mother was there and being a nurse, saw that my pupils were radically different from one another, a sure sign of a serious head injury. She took me to another hospital where it was determined I had a fractured skull. I didn’t remember anything for three or four days. I returned home after a week in the hospital and this part I remember like a photograph. I was walking to the refrigerator for orange juice when I felt a big pressure on my forehead, then I felt tremendously drunk. I woke up with my face under the water heater, staring at thick dust motes and the pilot light, my legs wet with piss, and my mother saying, “You’ve had a seizure, just relax.”
My body ached for days, as if I’d been bucked off a horse.
5 Highway 1
I came down the stairs with my little dog to answer the door at six in the morning, wearing only a long black and orange bathrobe. I was excited about seeing the man who was waiting there because I didn’t get to see him very often, and then only at his whim.
He had called at 5.30, drug-crazed, belligerent and exciting, demanding that I throw out whoever was in my bed, which I did. His name was Artie Mitchell and I had met him when I worked on my first porno film. He had continued to call after the work was through. Being addicted to bizarre sex, he was the only person I’d ever met who had no fear of the physical or chemical edge.
There was an air of chaos and sleazy glamor that permeated his life, now confirmed by the silver limo at the curb driven by his hunky blonde cousin who smiled as I was pulled without resisting into the back seat littered with children’s toys. I’d heard his wife was fertile.
I complained to him that I hadn’t locked my apartment door and he told me with drunken gallantry that he would replace whatever was stolen. There wasn’t much there anyway.
He had an uncommon ability for calling when I was on my period, but it wasn’t really that hard because I was bleeding more often than not. We did some cocaine and soon were humping like mink on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. Being concerned about the nice gray velour seats I told him I was bleeding heavily. He told me he didn’t care. We had hot, wet, mad menstrual sex on the bridge at sunrise, filling the back seat with orgasms while my little dog slept peacefully on the floor.
We took a break on the road to Mount Tam, where he pulled out a wad of money and wiped the blood off me
