Hella Nation - Evan Wright [119]
THE FIRST TIME I SAW Jasmin St. Claire at an industry function, it was on a yacht anchored near the Cheesecake Factory in Marina del Rey. Lights were strung in the rigging and twinkled on the water. Jasmin, whose dream of becoming an internationally recognized porn star was realized with the release of The World’s Biggest Gang Bang II, stood outside on the upper deck. She wore open-toe sandals with straps that twined up her calves, and a vaguely Grecian gown that made her resemble the type of alluring alien woman bedded by Captain Kirk on Star Trek. I noticed her, turned, and a moment later felt cold hands around my neck. She had thrown down her drink, walked swiftly across the deck and was choking me.
“Asshole!” she said.
I pried her hands off my neck and twisted around to face her. “I should have thrown my drink at you,” she said.
Weeks earlier, in an interview with Hustler, Jasmin had bragged of her business acumen. She had told me she was investing her porn proceeds in giant-gumball machines located on boardwalks in beach cities up and down the West Coast. She was furious not because I’d mocked her investment strategy in the published interview, but because I’d exposed her secret for getting rich.
“Everyone in the whole fucking world knows about my plans,” she said.
Our small violent struggle broke the ice, and Jasmin and I became friends. She began dropping by the office to chat about her appearances on Howard Stern and new acquisitions to her Barbie doll collection, and to spread vicious rumors. She was upset when Kendra Jade, a rival porn star, grabbed international headlines for taping herself having sex with Jerry Springer. For several weeks, Jasmin tried to persuade me to write an exposé about Kendra having the clap (an allegation she never substantiated). But Jasmin easily switched gears from nasty gossipmongering to heartfelt revelations about her private life. She was seeing a man who had a drug problem. Several days a week, she took him to recovery meetings. Her eyes grew misty as she described holding hands with recovering drug addicts as they joined to say the Lord’s Prayer at the end of a meeting.
Attractive, confident, sure of her career, possessed of an entertaining if sometimes cruel wit but revealing hints of an underlying compassionate nature, Jasmin sometimes struck me as the ideal girlfriend.
In the pages of Hustler, director Gregory Dark was often heralded as a genius, perhaps the only one in a field of triple-X hacks. This critical acclaim might have stemmed from the gratitude the magazine’s staff felt toward him, since over the years he had employed several Hustler editors to write his screenplays. In 1998, Psycho Sexuals, which I’d written under the pseudonym “Louis Umbro,” had been voted Best Video of the Year by the X-Rated Critics Organization (which I belonged to). Greg took a self-effacing view of his job as a triple-X director and my role as his writer, telling me, “Making porn videos isn’t for entertainment. They’re for whacking your wick. As long as we have the sex scenes, you can write a story about dogs barking in English rhyme.”
If Satan had come to Earth in the guise of an amiable person, he would probably have looked like Greg Dark. In his late forties, he stood over six feet tall. He favored black jeans and white T-shirts, and clipped his wallet to his belt loop with a long silver chain with links in the shape of miniature human skulls. His thickly muscled arms—he wrestled and boxed five days a week at a gym in the Valley—were tattooed with a snake and a devil’s head. His piercing blue-green eyes brought to mind an evil hypnotist in a cheesy horror film. A cigarette usually dangled from his lips, and his skin was the same color as the smoke curling from his mouth.
Greg was never happier than on the set of a porn shoot, and he was excited to get going on Psycho