Hella Nation - Evan Wright [116]
I can picture you and I kissing. I would just melt the minute your arms [begin] to wisp about my shoulders. You know the kind of picture that would send my mind into orbit with you. I would get on one knee and ask you to put your leg around my shoulder and those heels to dig into the side of my rib cage. Dam those white heeled shoes are fine . . . I bet when you walk it is a knock-out.
Can you bring yourself to me for just a day[?] We can get a couple of those strawberry crunch ice creams on a stick and look into each other’s eyes. [I] would softly rub one of your thighs as we sit knee to knee . . .
You could take me places through letters that would be called Dottie’s adventures. I would love to send you cards. And I would love to get to know you as a person. I’ve been to the Statue of Liberty twice. My first school trip in the second grade . . . was to a place called the Butterfly Farm.
BROOKE ASHLEY TOLD ME that 1997 was her “favorite year in porn.” She kept mementos of her career, begun when she was “fresh eighteen,” in a closet in her barely furnished Valley apartment—a stack of flattened video box covers and “slicks,” glossy promotional mini posters. Brooke was Asian and Caucasian, and in photographs her face changed from shot to shot. She was always pretty, always cute, usually costumed in diminutive schoolgirl skirts and ankle socks, with her hair in pigtails. Some of her proudest achievements were making the covers of such XXX videos as Gutter Mouths, Assy #5, Young and Anal #5 and Whoriental. One box cover superimposed a dialogue bubble next to Brooke’s smiling face, so she appeared to be saying, “I’m such a filthy slut, I’m such a pig!”
In the spring of 1998, Brooke tested positive for HIV. She believed she had been infected by a male porn star named Marc Wallice during the production earlier that year of a film titled World’s Biggest Anal Gang Bang. Brooke starred in it with fifty men.
Like other porn stars I knew, her biography might have been lifted from the more twisted girl copy in Barely Legal. As Brooke told it, she was born on an American air base in Korea, the offspring of a U.S. soldier and a Korean mother. She was raised in Kansas City and molested at the age of seven by “the old man down the hall.” According to Brooke, the old man pretended he was an invalid and needed a walker, but he was actually very strong when he got her alone in his apartment. He had lured her with ice cream. Things went downhill from there. Her mother left. Her father, who Brooke says was an avid porn-video collector, became a born-again Christian. Brooke grew close to an uncle who groomed her for beauty pageants. She often bragged, “I was a runner-up in the Miss Teen Kansas City Beauty Pageant when I was sixteen.” By the time she was eighteen, her uncle, who had functioned as her unofficial guardian, had been sent to federal prison on money-laundering charges. Brooke was working at Wal-Mart when she ran away to Florida, where she became an exotic dancer, and then to L.A., where she became a porn star.
The night I first visited her apartment, located in a sprawling stucco complex off Ventura Boulevard, Brooke hadn’t yet seen her gang-bang video. I had come over to show her the advance review copy that I’d received at LFP.
Brooke greeted me at the door in jeans and a gray T-shirt. “Dude, that better not be a Bible,” she said, laughing and pointing to a brown-leather appointment book I was carrying. “My dad sent me one when he found out I was sick. I threw it in the closet.”
As she entered the kitchen to get me a drink, her cat, Chronic—named after her favorite bud—scampered under her feet and tripped her. Brooke fell to her knees, laughing and cursing, and discovered her pager in a gap beneath the dishwasher. “I lost that thing a week ago.” She picked it up and walked into the living room, engrossed as she scrolled through all the calls she’d missed, forgetting about the drinks and the refrigerator door hanging open behind her.
Brooke’s pratfalls—knocking over her bong, tripping on a phone cord