by Jiz Lee
Leon led us all into his office. He had saved everything he could find about me and Tyler in a folder on the desktop of his computer. Images of me naked, sucking cock, and Tyler fucking my ass popped up on the screen. It was too bizarre to be real, yet was all too real. Leon was all jacked up about showing us. He was so proud of his collection of my porn clips. My mom never looked me in the eye the entire time. I ducked out of the room and walked down the hall.
“Ori, hey,” Leon called out. He came down the hall after me. “I just wanted to ask you and Tyler if you could put in a good word for me, you know, in the porn business. I was wondering if they need any guys who are in their forties, like me? I think I can measure up. Ask you, mom.”
I looked at Cheryl. She looked back at me, smiling. She nodded and said, “Do you think you could help him get in? He really wants to try doing porno movies. I don’t mind.”
They both hung on me for an answer. I turned to Tyler, who had a hopeful look on his face. I was the only one who thought this was wrong.
The corners of my mouth turned down as I spoke. “I don’t know.” It made me sick to even open my mouth.
“You two don’t have to tell anyone I’m with your mom. Just say I’m a friend.”
I wanted to kick his teeth in.
Tyler stepped in, but instead of siding with me, he sided with Leon. “Well, maybe, Ori. There’s always Jim. He hires anyone. You don’t have to do a scene with him. Let’s just see.”
I looked at Tyler with fractured eyes. The discussion was over. I was ready to puke. I didn’t even want a stepdaughter’s relationship with Leon, let alone a professional one. “We have to go home. I’m really uncomfortable that you guys asked me this. I don’t know what to say.”
Leon’s feathers got ruffled. He stiffened up and acted put out. My mom acted like nothing was wrong. Tyler and I hugged her and said goodbye. None of the other men she’d been involved with over the years ever acted perverted toward me.
In the car, Tyler wanted to continue the discussion. “It would help them out with money. Your mom said she didn’t care if he did scenes. I think he’s disappointed that you said no, just like that.”
“We are not going to do anything to help that man. This is unthinkable. It’s almost incest. I don’t care if his feelings are hurt.”
If we would have gotten Leon into porn, directors would have worked the incest angle to no end—or at least marketed him and me in the same films—and that was downright disgusting, even for me. How my mother could sit there blankly smiling, a doped-up specter, I could barely fathom.
I shouldn’t have expected much from a woman who basically never had a chance to learn how to be a mother. Her own mother gave her and her twin up for adoption when they were newborns. Life had dealt Cheryl a sad hand from the start. At fifteen, she got pregnant by a guy named Chuckie, my sister’s dad. When my mother got to the hospital to deliver, one of the nurses called out, “Here comes another baby havin’ a baby!”
Cheryl was wild too. She started smoking cigarettes and pot in elementary school. She repeatedly got into fights in junior high and high school, resulting in expulsion. As a teen mother, she was already married and divorced by the age of eighteen. Chuckie taught my sister a nursery rhyme that went something like, “Two Englishmen, two Englishmen digging a ditch / One called the other a son of a bitch / And if you ever get hit with a bucket of shit, be sure and shut your eyes.”
Cheryl and I once had a close relationship. She called me her best friend. When I was a child, she would let me get out of bed late at night and play gin rummy. At thirteen, I was old enough to smoke cigarettes with her. I admired the way she could blow enormous smoke rings. I don’t remember an age that she didn’t allow me to drink alcohol. There was always a bottle of vodka in the freezer. Cheryl never cared if I drank from it, just so long as I left some in there for her. She would even order margaritas and kamikazes for me at restaurants when I was underage. She was into really good, racy literature. Of course, I thought she was cool at the time. Being a cool mom was the top priority for her. Never mind that she forgot to pay electricity bills and spent all the grocery money on perfume and boots.
I learned the difference between being drunk and buzzed by watching my mother. A few drinks meant she was buzzed. Her complexion would get a little flushed. Laughter would come easily and loudly. She’d start singing and dancing, full of joy. Drunk Cheryl, on the other hand, was nasty. Fights would break out. She always fell to the ground in some way, usually on her ass. Once, she was severely drunk at my cousin’s tenth birthday party.
Our extended family went to Roller Gardens. The Wagon Wheel Bowling Alley was next door. My mom and her brothers got shitfaced at the bowling alley before joining the kids for some skating. Cheryl laced up her roller skates and barreled out into the rink. Halfway around the lap, she fell on her ass. She was just lying on her back, in the middle of the polished floor, kicking her legs in the air while sprawled out, slurring and unable to get up.
Still, there was more love than hate most of the time, at least when I was young—just enough. And I admired Cheryl’s brash fuck-off attitude, although her unpredictable and out-of-control behavior caused me to develop into a worrier. She might crash her car on the way home, drunk. My dad, Gary, might catch her in a lie about where she’d been. She could lose her job because of her bad temper. The cops might come and take her to jail for smoking pot or fighting with my dad. On and on.
When she had self-esteem, she was lively and unstoppable. She was the life of the party. My mom was the funniest person on Earth, always cussing and making me laugh. Her sense of humor was mean. The outgoing message on our answering machine said, “Leave a message, and fuck you.” My friends all thought it was hilarious and envied me.
I don’t remember her ever telling me not to do drugs. Throughout my childhood, both of my parents smoked pot. Cheryl openly admitted that she smoked weed while pregnant with me. I think she was proud of it. My parents sniffed speed too. I think their drug use is the reason why my parents split up. All the fighting and lying was amplified on drugs. They stayed out all night sometimes, doing speed and drinking. All I could think about was them ending up in jail, until I became an adolescent and began to think about exercising all the freedom their behavior provided me. At age thirteen, I got picked up by the police while I was riding around in my neighbor’s van. I was drunk with some other thirteen-year-old girls, high on oregano. The cops dropped us back at my house and we never got into trouble for it because my mom and dad weren’t home.
Cheryl constantly cheated on Gary. It began when I was a toddler. She abandoned my sister and me with my dad while she ran off to Nebraska with her lover. Gary took her back a few months later, but she never stopped screwing around with other men. She brought me out on her dates sometimes, while my dad was at work. One of her boyfriends took us to Catalina Island for the day when I was seven years old. She told me never to tell my dad who we were with or where we went. I followed her instructions carefully. I was her little sidekick, her accomplice.
My parents started abusing speed when I was around eleven or twelve. By my fourteenth birthday, they were out of their minds on it. I’d become bulimic and started having sex. Then my dad and I left my mom. We moved to Texas.
Cheryl went to live with some other guy. She started using heroin with this other guy, so he became her boyfriend. She went from using speed with my dad to shooting heroin and speed with her new boyfriend. I loathed this man. I came to live with them when I returned to California. I couldn’t stand Texas for very long. My father made it clear that I was choosing my mom over him. He was hurt. It ended our relationship. Gary no longer wanted to be my dad after I returned to Cheryl.
The plumbing at her and her boyfriend’s house was a mess. The only thing that worked in that house was sadness. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t want to be a loser. I needed to finish high school. I made the best of this gloomy life. My mom was always passed out from drugs. She coul
d barely speak half of the time. She would go crazy and fight with her loser boyfriend every few days. She had a gun and would threaten to end her life with it. She held the gun in her mouth and to her head, in front of me, many times. I would cry and tell her not to do it.
I wanted to kill myself too. A few times, I came close. I wanted to electrocute myself by tossing my radio into the bathtub with me. Thankfully, the thought of dying in the presence of my junky mother and her equally despicable boyfriend prevented me from trying. I lived through my depressing teen years. I smoked a little pot and tried speed, but I didn’t want to be like my mom and dad.
As much as my real parents fought and did drugs, it was nothing compared to how much worse things became after they separated. Both my mom and her boyfriend contracted hepatitis C. They got it from used heroin needles. It didn’t stop their drug abuse. They would often pass out with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. As early as six or seven in the evening, they would be smacked out of consciousness. I would peek into their bedroom and glare at the two lifeless bodies on the waterbed. My heart would fill with darkness. The ash would fall and smolder on the blanket, never turning into flame.
At fourteen, my sister, who lived with her father and stepmother, took me to live with her for six months. The living conditions in our home had become unsuitable. There were needles lying around the entire house and two other junkies living there. The house was full of cigarette smoke and ashes. The carpet had too many burn holes to count. There were broken windows with tape on them. Until Cheryl could provide me a real bedroom and clean up the rest of the house, I would live with my sister.
My mom was in and out of mental health facilities as well. She had to find ways to get prescriptions for downers. Because she was so fucked-up all the time, my mom couldn’t work. Her job became a full-time effort to find ways not to work. She compelled countless doctors and psychologists to deem her crazy and disabled. Her liver and thyroid were legitimately shot. The Valium, Vicodin, Percocet, methadone, and codeine pills she was taking made her incoherent enough to be viewed as mentally incapable. She collected worker’s compensation and disability. She qualified for welfare until I turned eighteen. After she could no longer claim benefits in the name of her child, she began making a case for social security.
The fact that I returned to and graduated high school (not on “independent study”) was miraculous. My mom never made me go to school. I ditched all the time. She was so out of it she never even knew when I was in the house. She let me get tattooed at fifteen. I got picked up by the cops pretty regularly for alcohol and curfew violations. I chain-smoked and drank hard alcohol until I was sick. I came and went with my friends as I pleased. It wasn’t a real home for me, just a place I had to live.
My mother always had an excuse, a reason, for poisoning herself in all of these ways: to deal with the pain of being alive.
No matter how much I tried to assert my individuality, I ended up being like her. I was a rebel like her. I started to take drugs. They started out as something fun, just like they probably had for Cheryl. Then I turned to them when everything was going wrong. My mother ruined her life because she never stopped using.
Now, Cheryl lives just down the street from my sister. When we talk about it all, my sister with an even, noble tone, suggests, “Just wait until you have kids, Ori. You will understand how much it hurts when a child turns their shoulder to their mother.”
Each day I get older and closer to understanding my own mortality, I think of my mother’s life. She was a vibrant person once.
When I was a child I often wondered, if I am unable to take care of myself when I grow up, will all I need to do is shack up with some asshole and get wasted to survive? But I never fully fed into the legacy. Tyler had his faults, and we had our chemical fun, but the reciprocity of love was more than maybe even I give it credit. I do, however, think my mom definitely contributed to my drug addiction. She and I did drugs together until I stopped.
But only her good characteristics influenced me—gave me the balls, so to speak—to get into porn. She showed me D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin when I was a kid, and my sexual life, for pleasure and for work, has been its own poetry. My mother was open about sex, positively. And she was the life of the party. In her better days, she taught me a fun way of being, by example. Her fuck you, don’t tell me what to do attitude built me to be bold enough to start doing porn, and I thank her for that.
AGAINST THE GRAIN: COMING OUT TO MY PARENTS
Phoenix Askani
Phoenix Askani is a writer and former adult performer from Chicago, Illinois. She has been featured in adult movies from studios such as Burning-Angel, Kink.com, Evil Angel, Naughty America, Brazzers, Devil’s Films, Filly Films, Dungeon Corp, and more between 2009 and 2014. You can find more of her writing at ThoughtCatalog.com. She currently resides in Los Angeles.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been the member of my immediate family to make decisions that one might consider to be against the grain. I was brought up Catholic and attended public school in our residential neighborhood just outside of Chicago, Illinois. I have two brothers, one about two years my senior and one born four years after I was. We all attended church together every Sunday and my mother also played piano for mass regularly; in fact, I believe she still does every so often. We played piano recitals. We were in the choir. My older brother and I served as altar attendants. I attended religious education classes and went on to confess to my parents that I didn’t wish to be confirmed on the day of the confirmation. My name was in the pamphlet and I didn’t go. I told my mother that I didn’t want to lie. I continued to swim against the stream on through my adolescence.
In high school, I started listening to more punk rock and heavy metal, and quickly decided wearing mostly black was the most comfortable option for me. My parents and brothers questioned the loud music that sounded “like a screaming monkey playing garbage cans” and my dark styling options. I frequented concerts and basement shows and got picked up from a metal band’s hotel after-party at 4:00 a.m. by a very frustrated father who had no idea that was his sixteen-year-old girl’s first time drinking a beer.
I lost my virginity at the age of eighteen to my first serious boyfriend, a long-distance relationship that lasted just shy of a year and fizzled out the winter after I graduated from high school. I recall expressing to him on the phone that I wanted to pose nude for an “alternative” website of some sort, and he expressed his discomfort. Truthfully, I was not entirely comfortable with the idea myself yet and still beginning to explore my sexuality, but I let the idea of getting naked on the Internet swim around in my mind for two years before it actually happened. I joined an adult website as a member to make sure I knew what I was up for before I eventually clicked the page that said “Model Application.” That website was BurningAngel.com.
If there’s one thing I could change, it’s not the fact that I started doing porn, but the fact that I wasn’t honest to my parents about my intentions when I got on a plane to Los Angeles at age twenty to “model.” I confided in my mother that I would be posing nude for photo sets only but I was hiding a lot of information. She knew I had an interest in modeling and had posed for friends studying photography in college, but what she did not know was that I had been posting scantily-clad photos of myself on the Internet since age nineteen on message boards and submitting them to a blog that now no longer exists. That year, I began booking more photo shoots through sites like ModelMayhem.com and posing topless or nude in photos. Through other modeling work and networking websites, I chatted with adult performers and models with varying experience. Some of those people I befriended by chance as they inspired me to do whatever I wanted with my body and just own it, and they gave me well-intentioned advice. When you have at least one person you can talk to about deciding to work in the adult industry, it makes you feel a little more at ease.
By the time I was on the phone with BurningAngel.com CEO, perfor
mer, and director, Joanna Angel (whom I now consider a good friend), discussing wardrobe options and the next day’s flight, I had already told my mother that I was working for a woman and that I felt safe doing the shoot and she needn’t worry, I’d be back in just a couple of days. I even showed her the website and repeated I’d only be doing photos as she scrolled over Google results that highlighted potential risks of the porn industry and stalkers. She questioned my safety, stated once the photos were up, “creeps” and the like would be able to see them, and asked if I was sure about my decision. Knowing that I’d secretly been considering it for nearly two years, I got on the plane with the intention of telling the truth after I shot my first few scenes that weekend and could speak some truth about the industry, or at least what I had experienced of it in that brief amount of time. I wasn’t really given that option, but you could certainly say I set myself up for that.
I filmed my first hardcore pornographic scene in July 2009 in Los Angeles. I had a fun weekend shooting and felt amazing after shaking off my nerves and embracing my visceral side and inner exhibitionist. After shooting a few enjoyable scenes, I boarded my connecting flight ready to head back to Chicago with a new sense of confidence, as if I had truly let the beast out of its cage. It was so incredibly freeing to be naked in front of a crew and do something that felt so exhilarating and natural to me while knowing it would later be distributed and on the Internet, available to even more eyeballs. During a short layover, I charged my phone and turned it on to text my mom and let her know I was soon to board the last leg and arrive home safely. She has always been the safety first, worrywart type (I don’t blame her), so I made an effort to check in with her often in an effort to ease her worries some. The glow and thrill depleted some when I received an unpleasant text message from her that read, “I know what you did.”
