It’s a Wednesday night in late May, and Ryder Sky and her husband, Bill, are celebrating their
third anniversary. They keep it simple and order in pizza. The next morning,
Sky heads to work at a boxy, modern house in the San Fernando Valley, in Los
Angeles. Before long, backdropped by a floor-to-ceiling window, she lowers her
mouth onto the erect penis of a sideburned actor who calls himself James Deen.
“That’s beautiful,” says a scruffy-faced director. “Now
give me a jawbreaker.”
Sky adjusts Deen’s penis so that its head causes her
left cheek to bubble. “Do you ever do anal?” the director asks her.
Nine hours later, Sky, a 24-year-old porn actress,
pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way, returns to the cozy house near Studio
City that she shares with Bill, who works as a driver for a talent agency.
Inside their neatly organized home, mainstream DVDs are racked near a
flat-screen TV and remnants of supper cool in a pot on the stove. Husband and
wife are sprawled across the sofa. Bill, in his mid-thirties, muscular and
handsome, wears jeans and a pullover; Sky’s in plaid pajama pants and a tank
top. If it weren’t for the handblown glass dildo artfully displayed on their
coffee table (Sky’s name is etched on the bottom), this would be a standard
picture of American domesticity.
Sky and Bill met in 2002 while working together at an
independent film-production company. They have a seemingly solid marriage. It’s
only when Bill thinks too hard about what his wife’s been doing in the year
since she quit her job as an executive assistant to become a full-time porn
star that things get difficult. Occasionally, he can’t
keep from mulling over the fact that he’s home alone while she’s getting it on
with another man. “Sometimes I think about it when she works late and I’m going
to bed,” he says. “It’s not negative, though. It’s more like, eh . . . “ He trails off with
a what-can-you-do groan.
This is what it’s like to be married to a porn star.
While you toil away at a conventional job during the week, your wife spends
eight hours a day getting plowed by guys with nicknames like Thug of Porn.
There are the indelible mental images. There is the awkwardness of explaining
to friends and colleagues—let alone to your parents—what she does. And then
there’s the fact that you don’t even get to have sex with her all that
often—intercourse is off-limits before a shoot, and afterward she’s too tired
and sore.
Bill describes his sex life
with Sky as vanilla; “We schedule sex,” he says. But that bothers him less than
his wife’s habitually telling colleagues she’s “in a relationship” rather than
married. “She hardly ever wears her wedding ring, even off-set,” Bill says. “Why
be ashamed of being married?” Sky insists that it’s not a matter of shame. “I
don’t want to get typecast as a MILF,” she says.
Otherwise sanguine as Bill seems about their
arrangement, he shows some discomfort when he explains that his family doesn’t
know what his wife does for a living and admits that he doesn’t go out of his
way to tell coworkers about her occupation. At his previous job, a colleague
saw a picture of Sky on Bill’s desk and recognized her. “He said, ‘Hey, that’s
Ryder Sky,’“ Bill says. “I said, ‘Yeah, she’s my wife.’ He said, ‘You’re a
lucky guy.’“ This hangs in the air for a beat before he continues. Being a porn
star is what Sky wants. She makes good money, she doesn’t get bossed around by
a suit, and she has time to attend college (majoring in women’s studies). He
isn’t going to stand in her way. “I want her to be happy. And it’s a turn-on,
in a way. On the downside, though, there are guys having sex with your wife.”
But rather than avoid seeing her work, Bill watches
Sky’s movies religiously and stealthily posts positive sentiments on porn
sites, occasionally attacking critics. “I don’t look at it as sex,” he says. “I
look at it as a guy with his dick in my wife, but they’re working and it’s not
emotional. She never orgasms in porn. That’s for us. If it happened on the set,
it would be a little weird.”
Ryan Brown is standing in the
doorway of a room at a Motel 6 in Van Nuys, California. The 23-year-old car
detailer, in training to be a firefighter, and his just-legal fiancée, Kelly
Skyline, are down from Sacramento while she shoots a movie.
Inside, arranged around the TV, are a container of body butter, a bag of Runts,
and a DVD of Be My Bitch 6 (Skyline’s considering a role in 7).
Skyline wears low-slung jeans that expose a suntan tattoo of two hearts just
above her hip line. Brown (not his real last name), an easygoing, nerdy-looking
kid, appears mellow and doting. They’re discussing
a recent on-the-job injury that Skyline suffered—one that Brown, usually at
peace with his fiancée’s occupation, found troubling. “I got a text message
from her that said ‘I’ve been ripped,’“ he recalls. Skyline had been shooting a
scene with Billy Glide, a porn star who’s nicknamed the Human Wine Bottle, and
his oversize penis tore the inside of her vagina.
Brown knew the drill. “Get that text
and you know it’s no sex for a few days,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I
constantly made Epsom-salt baths and forced her to get in. It burns the cut but
also helps it to heal faster.”
Brown and Skyline met a few years ago.
She was a student at the high school where Brown was the pole-vaulting coach
for the track team. They began dating after she graduated, and he told her that
he wanted an open relationship. Skyline agreed. A few months later, trained by
Brown’s sister-in-law, the porn actress Trina Michaels, Skyline entered an amateur-night
contest at a strip club and won. Soon after, she decided to try her hand at the
X-rated-movie business. “My feeling was, if she does it, cool,” Brown says. “It
wasn’t a big deal either way. But once you start, you can’t undo it.” Brown
sees it as beneficial to their open relationship. He and Skyline recently had a
threesome with a boyhood friend of his (he ranks as a hero among his pals), and
she occasionally brings home costars. “Girlfriends of mine call and say that
they want to come by for a swim,” Skyline says. “I say, ‘Yeah, it’s okay. You
can fuck him.’”
Rusty, a 34-year-old bouncer
in L.A. married to a porn star named Mikayla Mendez, leads
a slightly less charmed domestic existence. It’s not so much dealing with his
wife’s occupational hazards or with the guys at work—”They always ask if it
bothers me,” Rusty says. “It doesn’t”—it’s a future of contending with soccer
moms. Rusty and Mendez, 28, have a 3-year-old son. This month he’ll be starting
preschool, and there will inevitably be questions about what his parents do for
a living. “I’ll play it off,” Mendez says vaguely. Rusty, crooking his shaved
head, says he’ll run interference: “I’ll play Mr. Mom. I’ll go to school and
interact with the parents.”
The couple met through friends in 2002.
Mendez, a former patients’ advocate in the health-care industry, stumbled into
porn five years ago after answering a newspaper ad for figure models. She now
drives a Mercedes Kompressor and, between acting, stripping, and personal
appearances, earns a six-figure income. But she hasn’t knitted her porn career
into her personal life: She avoids discussing scenes with Rusty.
That policy is more for her own
emotional well-being than for Rusty’s—he insists that he’d happily talk shop. “Porn
has improved our love life—we do it every day and it turns me on that she’s
with other people,” he says, though he admits he has concerns about STDs and
expresses relief that Mendez now has a contract with a company that does
condom-only movies. “She’s an animal, and I am very unusual. What can I say?”
Kenneth Austin, who grew up
in Trenton, New Jersey, has no compulsion to talk shop with his girlfriend,
eight-year porn veteran Charmane Star—or to see any of her films. For
Austin, a clean-cut 32-year-old who works in interactive marketing, the only
way for the relationship to work is for the details of Star’s professional life
to remain walled off from their personal life.
But one drunken night
about a year ago, not long after they started dating, that boundary was
crossed. “We went with a couple of my girlfriends to hang out in their hotel
room,” Star says, sitting on the terrace of a Japanese restaurant overlooking
the Sunset Strip. “Then this music-producer dude showed up and all of a sudden
these girls were running around in their panties.” She shrugs. “My friends are
porno. That’s the way it is.”
“I happily left,” Austin
says. “Those girls were trash.”
Having lived in Hollywood for three years, Austin
insists that Star, a petite Filipina with an exuberant laugh, is the sanest
girl he’s met here. He doesn’t lie to his friends about what she does, and they’ve
been mostly supportive. “One told me that he erased all her movies from his
hard drive,” he says. Even his parents have been accepting. Still, Austin looks
relieved when the conversation turns to Star’s decision last month to stop
shooting porn with men and to focus exclusively on women.
She maintains that the switch has nothing to do with
Austin. “He’s lucky and his timing is good,” she says, excusing herself to go
to the bathroom. Austin watches her leave. “When she did do it [with guys],” he
says, “it was hard for me to deal with. But my attitude is that if you can find
a cool girl . . . good for you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment