During the summer of 2005, I wrote an essay about my experiences in Porn Valley. "A Porn Valley Story" is 5,000 words long, it took me five days to write, and it can be found in Best Sex Writing 2006, edited by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste, and published by Cleis Press.
I've got a Porn Valley story for you. Let's pretend I'm a porn star. Are you game? I know I am. My name is Annie Body. I'm from Barstow, or Fresno, or some other outlying town. I had a mother, or a father--one but not the other. I was happy, or somebody left me, or I don't want to remember. I was a virgin who never dated, I was the girl everybody knew but nobody understood, I was the class slut who read her name on the bathroom wall in high school, thinking, That's me, noting what the words on either side of my name said about me. I forged a plan to be a star, to change my name, to reinvent myself. The month I turned eighteen, the day I left my boyfriend, the minute I saved up enough money, so I could go somewhere, so I could leave that place, a U-haul arrived, a pickup truck pulled up, I put everything I had into the trunk of my car. I made my way along a stretch of highway toward a city with a crown at the top of its tallest tower. I became a student, a waitress, an actress. I didn't get far. That's when I come across an ad in the local paper. I sense there is something in it that can make me bigger than I am, that can change the smallness inside me into something smaller, that can flip everything in my life, in my head, in my heart into the emotional equivalent of a Sears portrait background, all innocuous blues and Lithium swirls. I drive over the Hollywood Hills. The San Fernando Valley suits me, I think. I experience déjà vu, my mind stumbles over something, my memory skips like a broken record. There's the building, the second-floor office, the man who says "Hello." I shake his hand. The door closes behind me. He explains the situation. Photos. Movies. Naked. Sex. XXX. If I'm not interested, don't let the door hit me where the good Lord split me. I go down a hall, I enter a back room, I stand nude in the blinding light of a Polaroid flash illuminating the wood paneling behind me but wholly wiping out the finer details of my freckled features. The next day, my phone rings. It's the man from the office. His hair is slick, his teeth are enamled, and he wears one gold chain because he likes to keep it simple. I go to a house, a soundstage, a movie studio. I meet a director, a cameraman, a male performer. I am by no means a virgin--I did this once, but not professionally or anything. I recognize this is a surreality. I'm given a new name. I go through the motions. Upside down, inside out, all around. The eye of the video camera does not falter in its unblinking stare. It makes no difference how far I open my legs or how deeply I bend over, how far I go outside myself or how deeply I fall inside myself. Afterward, I'm reminded of who I am when my new name comes out of other people's mouths on the next movie shoot, at the drugstore near where I live, at the strip club where I dance to earn extra money. I get a brand-new car, a really big apartment, a boyfriend who supports what I do, who will leave me because of what I do, who carries my suitcase so I can do what I do. My old life seems very far away. I have no regrets, except when I visit my mother, get depressed, or am drunk. In interviews for the dirty magazines on the covers of which I now appear, I say I do it for the sex. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don't. Either way, that's what I tell them. Of course, I do it for another reason altogether. It makes me gape. This is the manner in which I go inside myself, for I can find no other way to get into that space I've hidden deep within myself. This is who I am.
