Full Disclosure

TWO

The first rule of Cinnamon’s—the only rule, really—was that you could not be topless on the floor. As the Louisiana State Legislature dictated, “Entertainers whose breasts or buttocks are exposed to view shall perform only upon a stage at least eighteen inches above the immediate floor….” No woman’s feet shall touch earth if she is showing her boobs for dollars. Amen.

At many clubs, if a customer requests a private dance, you could raise your hand straight high in the air and a bouncer would bring over a little box for you to stand on. But Cinnamon’s was so small that they didn’t even have room for boxes. If you wanted to give somebody a dance, you took them in the back room where they had a mini stage set up. There was a squiggly curve we could stand on next to each other, and the guys sat on rolling chairs.

My first Friday night at Cinnamon’s I heard this rule about ten times in the first ten minutes I was there. “It’s the easiest way for cops to bust up the place,” said Cinnamon.

“I get it,” I said. “The floor is lava.”

“Lava,” she said. “If you do a dance, you absolutely have to put your dress back on before you get down.”

I didn’t have good dancing clothes, so I had bought a dress cheap from the club. It was red velvet, and I paired it with white heels from home. It didn’t take long before a guy asked for a dance. He was okay looking, a skinny guy with brown hair. I led him to the back room and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

I took the spot right next to Tracy, who was this total biker chick. She was the wife of one of the Banditos, a local motorcycle club. She’d been a stripper all her life, pretty but ridden hard and put away wet. Beef jerky in a slingshot G-string that went up top on her shoulders, always accessorized with thigh-high leather biker boots.

We were about three feet apart, and she had just started a dance for this shifty-looking bald guy. I started dancing for my guy, which was awkward enough my first time, but I was also watching her, sneaking looks to get a sense of what I should be doing.

I took off my dress, and the guy seemed so into it. Good start, but now what? What do I do with the dress? I didn’t want to throw it on the floor, so I wrapped it around my guy’s shoulders and played with it like a sexy scarf.

Right next to me, Tracy turned her back on the guy and bent over so he could see her ass. Noted, I thought. I’ll do that near the end. I had just returned my focus to my guy when all hell broke loose right next to me.

As Tracy bent over, her tampon string was sticking out of her G-string. Now, I have seen this happen twice my entire stripping career. But it was so much worse than that. The guy had tried to light the string with a cigarette lighter. Tracy saw it between her legs, and in one swift move of superhuman strength, she pulled her boot right off by the heel and repeatedly swung it down on her guy to beat the shit out of him.

“What the fuck?” I screamed, trying not to get hit.

My guy ran past me out of the club, a horny Wile E. Coyote escaping with my dress still on his shoulders. I had no dress, only a G-string, and I was three feet away from Tracy pummeling the fuck out of this guy. And the ground was lava.

Do you think Cinnamon’s had security cameras? No, they had a video baby monitor that the bartender would periodically check. It took the bartender, who was also the bouncer that night, a couple of minutes before he came in to pull Tracy off the guy.

“I’m sorry, I thought she was a firecracker!” the guy yelled as he was thrown out the door onto the gravel.

“Tracy, you can’t do that,” said the bartender.

“He lit my vagina on fire!” she yelled. “Kitty had a tail and he lit it!”

Meanwhile, I was still standing on the squiggle stage, covering my breasts like this scaredy cat.

“What are you doing?” the bartender asked.

“The guy took my dress,” I said, looking down at the lava floor.

“Oh, God, you can get down,” he said. “It’s not that serious. When there’s somebody getting killed, you can leave.”

“Good to know,” I said. Someone let me borrow a dress. And that, folks, was my first thirty minutes as a stripper.

I grew to love Tracy and every single girl who worked there. There were less than twenty total, about six girls working a night, which is nothing. You got to pick your own music, and to this day I will hear a song and my mind goes to seeing one girl dancing to it, all of her signature moves and favorite outfits.

Tracy only danced to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” so you would hear it about twenty-five freaking times a night. She was all big and bad until her man would come in the club with all his bikers.

Then there was Amy, the one who I met at the concert. I think of her when I hear Heart’s “Magic Man.” She was this little tiny thing with a huge ass, and she would walk, not really dance. Her big move was to bend down so her hair fell forward, then arch her body to throw it back.

I can’t forget Mercedes in her white nighties, always dancing to Ratt. She was this tall, super-leggy blonde, and she barely fit on the stage. Her go-to was a vertical split, lifting her leg until her foot was flat on the ceiling. Then she’d start bumping the pole with her pussy. She wore classic nineties pumps, and she had to take one off as she raised her leg or she’d be too tall to do the trick. Mercedes had these great, natural boobs, but the main thing I remember is that she had found these baby ducks with no mom and was caring for them. She brought a little kiddie pool into the dressing room on weekends and there would be these brown ducklings wading around.

Billie was a fitness model who drove a white Chrysler 300, so I am pretty sure she had sugar daddies. She only came in to work for emergencies, usually two days before her rent was due. Then there was Venus, a lesbian who I thought was so hot. And Phoebe, tall and skinny with a pixie cut, hate-dancing to Lords of Acid’s “Pussy.” She’d hit her heels hard on the stage, but in the dressing room she was always crying, pleading with whoever was on the phone to let her see her kid. “You promised I could see him tomorrow” was the litany every weekend. He was about three, and she had to go to court to try to see him, but they used a solicitation charge against her. She danced with anger.

The oldest, Cheryl, was in her late forties and very pretty. She was a grandmother, which I couldn’t get my head around at the time. Now I feel like I am hurtling toward that age. She was older and made no secret that she’d had a rough life, but she was unfailingly kind. Her good soul shone through and made her beautiful.

These women raised me, doing the job my mother had bowed out of. Thanks to them, I learned I was putting in tampons wrong. They taught me how to shave my bikini line so it wouldn’t break out, and how to do makeup. I saw this weird little contraption on the dressing room table and blurted out, “What is that fucking thing?”

“It’s an eyelash curler,” said Cheryl.

“You’re supposed to curl your lashes?” I asked.

“Oh, sweetie,” said Mercedes.

“Raised by wolves,” sighed Cheryl, fixing her lipstick.

I grew up in a strip club, and like all the dancers, I called Cinnamon “Mom.” My grades never suffered, and no one from school ever knew except for my best friend, Elizabeth. My trainer, Nancy, had introduced me to her husband, Dr. Dan, at the LSU veterinary school just down the street from the barn. I started working there after school, and the highlight was caring for a foal. I applied to a veterinary school in Texas, and in the spring I was accepted with a scholarship. But I still worried about living expenses.

I was the baby at Cinnamon’s, though no one knew just how young. The weekend before my March 17 birthday in 1997, they got me a cake. HAPPY 19TH BIRTHDAY! it read. But it would be my eighteenth birthday, one of the worst days of my life.

There were subtle signs, then an avalanche. Around the time I moved in with Andy, I noticed that Jade seemed a little more timid about jumps. By then, we’d had each other seven years, so we could read each other. I became much more concerned in February, when she started a rapid decline. She had consistent diarrhea and seemed increasingly listless. I led her over to Dr. Dan at the veterinary office where I worked. He had always done checkups and let me work off the payments in the office, or simply didn’t charge us. He did a full workup on her and even tested her for toxins to make sure she hadn’t been poisoned. He wondered if maybe she had a heart murmur, and we took a wait-and-see approach.

Then she deteriorated quickly, and by the first week of March she was wasting away. Her hair became dull and she resembled the poor, pathetic horse she had been when I first got her. I knew she had been through a lot of abuse before I had her, but she was only twenty. The average lifespan of a horse is about twenty-eight, plus or minus a few years. But she had rapidly gone from doing these huge jumps to looking like she was near death.

The last day I rode her, I knew it was the end. Spring had come and an early run of warm weather had coaxed out all the yellow butterweeds and buttercups along the trail. That day with Jade there was a sudden cold snap, so it was surreal for it to be so cold yet still have wildflowers all over. I put Jade’s blanket on her to ride her—she was too thin to saddle her up, and this would keep her warm. We did a trail ride and I told her I loved her. I knew what I had to do, and afterward, I went to Dr. Dan.

“It’s not fair to her,” I told Dr. Dan. “She’s so miserable.”

“I know,” he said. “I agree.”

We decided to put her down, and the only time they could schedule it for was March 17, our shared birthday. I wanted to be there for it. I knew this would be bad. If you are picturing it like the gentle passing of a dog, nestled in a blanket, you’re wrong. Horses don’t curl up and die after they get a lethal injection. Their reaction is pretty violent, with the horse collapsing and sometimes rearing back.

All the vets came in to support us. I didn’t cry much because I had already said good-bye on the trail. They let me braid her forelock so they could give it to me after, and I talked to her as I separated and twisted the hair. I told her not to be scared.

And then she was gone.

They pulled her shoes to give me, everyone tearing up. They never sent me a bill or expected anything from me for the care and kindness. Because this was a veterinary school, I knew they were going to examine the body to learn what went wrong. A couple of weeks later I was at the barn, still working just to be around horses, when a few of the vets came over to me, seeming shell-shocked.

“Jade had been operating on one valve of her heart,” one told me.

“It had been dead for so long that her heart was a different color,” said the other. “We don’t understand how she was walking, much less jumping.” He went on to explain that what caused the sudden deterioration was that she stopped absorbing food from scarring in her stomach after years of parasites. She was just destroyed on the inside.

Jade came into my life when I needed her, and she left when I needed her to leave. I had an apartment and plans for school. I couldn’t afford her anymore, and at eighteen, I couldn’t be tethered to a horse. I had to move on, and she let me. I’ve had so many horses since Jade, but she was the best I ever had.

I graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School with straight As and a goal of deferring college for a year. I was “taking a year off,” I told everyone. I wanted to continue working, build up savings, and then be able to focus on my studies when the time came. I taught summer camp at the equestrian center for five dollars an hour and continued dancing at Cinnamon’s for a lot more. I started dyeing my hair red and noticed that I made more money as a redhead than with my natural dark hair. I made $325 one night and thought I’d won the lottery. I actually went shopping for once, which I had trained myself not to do. I was so proud of being self-sufficient that I put a bumper sticker on my Toyota Celica. It read, FOLLOW ME TO CINNAMON’S.

At the very end of August, I started having symptoms that felt like strep. My throat was on fire and I had a fever so high I was hallucinating. I didn’t want to go to the doctor because I didn’t have insurance and I knew it would be a fifty-dollar visit, plus whatever for the medicine. It was the weekend, and I was already out the money from missing some work at Cinnamon’s. Finally, my boyfriend Andy got so worried about me that he dragged me to a clinic on Sunday, August 31.

The doctor prescribed Cefalexin. Now, there’s nothing wrong with some cephalosporins among friends, but it turned out I was allergic. I took the first dose, not knowing it was a time bomb in my body. Andy went to work, delivering pizzas late into the night, while I lay on our mattress on the floor. By then we had an old TV, but no cable. It had rabbit ears, so it would randomly catch a signal every now and again. But I had it on for white noise.

The itch started in my left arm, but gradually it spread throughout my body, going deep, as if it was in my veins. I was also having trouble breathing, still feverish and now slipping in and out of sleep.

A little after eleven at night, the TV switched from dead air to picking up NBC. I was too weak to look up, but I could hear it. Princess Diana had been badly injured in a car crash in Paris. Soon, Brian Williams was flickering in and out of my subconscious, his updates playing out in my fever dream. The itching under my skin intensified to a point that I reached for a cassette case, shook out the tape and insert card, and broke it in half. I brought the sharp edge to my arm to cut at the itch. I scratched myself up, and the pain masked the itch for just a few moments.

I was still in and out at 1 A.M. when Brian Williams returned to my little fucked-up, feverish universe to tell me Diana was dead. Andy came home at about two in the morning and found me incoherent. He’d heard the news about Diana at work, but I was telling him about it as if the whole thing was my bad fever dream. Like my mind and the world had somehow become porous.

Andy knew that he needed to take me back to the doctor, but he didn’t have the money. This tells you how desperate he was: he called my mom.

“She’s really sick,” Andy said.

My mom said something to him, and before he could answer, she hung up on him. I asked him what she said, and he didn’t say.

Andy had guns—it was Andy and it was Louisiana—so the first thing he did Monday morning was sell one for cash to take me to the doctor. They diagnosed the allergic reaction, and with the wrong medicine leaving my system and the right one doing the job, I began to feel better right away. I still have light scars on my arms from the cassette case.

“Hey,” I said, sitting back at home later, able to eat the cold pizza he’d brought from work. “What did my mother say on the phone?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“What did she say?”

He sighed. “She said, ‘She abandoned me and I fucking hope she dies.’”

“Wow,” I said. “I abandoned her? I abandoned her?”

In March 2018, just days before my birthday, my mother and father each gave interviews to a Texas newspaper about me and President Trump. My mom told the reporter, who probably believed her, “My friends all say the same thing: ‘I can’t believe that is the same sweet child—you took such good care of her.’” My father professed to be worried I might come to harm for telling the truth about Trump’s attempts to silence me. “You start rattling the cage of powerful people, and you don’t know what might happen,” he said. Right below his quote, mind you, the newspaper provided a photograph of my home and detailed the neighborhood where I live. You know, just in case anyone wanted to kill me.

I was hurt by my mom’s revisionist history—at least my dad was honest in his interview about being MIA all my life—so I posted the article on the private Facebook account I keep for my friends and chosen family. Without much prompting, my childhood friends had a field day. Travis, the boy who moved in next door when I was six, was one of the first to chime in. “If they want to bring up old memories,” he wrote, “let’s ask them how many times your mom would leave you all alone?”

Another childhood friend recounted how my mom had told her parents she was dying of cancer and needed money. My friend said her parents noticed she didn’t die, but she did have a new car.

Renee, who I used to ride with as a kid, wrote, “Some of us KNEW your mother.”

My best friend from high school, Elizabeth, added: “I remember your mom very well. Who could forget the Christmas Tree Incident?”

“I feel like I owe every one of you an apology,” I wrote after reading all those reality-check hugs from lifelong friends. “And somehow a fruitcake seems appropriate too.”

“How many?” Cinnamon asked me.

“I’m up to three,” I said.

“Six a night,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

It was a house rule that the girls at Cinnamon’s had to sell a minimum of six drinks a night. You were supposed to hustle the guys and get them to buy you the twelve-dollar double, with the house getting six bucks and you getting the other half. They knew I didn’t drink, and they knew I was underage, but it didn’t matter. The bartender would secretly make mine a virgin, and the lie didn’t sit well with me. I felt guilty making a guy buy a twelve-dollar Sprite and telling him, “Oooh, I love vodka.”

Sometimes the guys would check, and if they caught you, they would get mad at you. I was already thinking long game, and that customer would then be someone who’d stand with his hands behind his back every time I danced. Worse, I just have a thing about liars, and I never wanted to be one.

This was bugging me more and more going into fall, and one October night a steady customer at the club got handsy with me. I batted him away and waved at the bouncer, thinking he would say something. Nothing. This jerk grabbed at me again. I yelled, this time so loud everyone heard me, which wasn’t hard in a trailer titty bar. I looked right at the bouncer, imploring him to do something. He bit his bottom lip and glanced at the office.

He was too good a customer. I had worked there for nine months, lying to men about my Sprites to make the club an extra thirty-six dollars a night, but they wouldn’t do anything to help me.

I got emotional and I went to the dressing room, stuffing all my things into a bag. I left Cinnamon’s and I never went back. I am sorry to say that I left in anger, because I loved all those girls so much. Of all the women I have worked with over the years, they are the ones I still think about.

Right away, I knew who to call: the Gold Club.

The Gold Club was the nicest gentlemen’s club in Baton Rouge. The guy on the phone said I could come in for an audition at two forty-five the next day, fifteen minutes before they opened. I met the managers, John and Larry, plus the floor guy, Casey.

The club was absolutely huge compared to Cinnamon’s, but the guys were very nice and put me at ease. John had to go up in the DJ booth to cue up my Mötley Crüe song because the DJ wasn’t even there yet. It was easier to do with nobody there, and I was confident I was a good dancer. That was always my saving grace: I could dance. I didn’t just wander around the stage and make my butt clap.

“Do you want to start tonight?” asked John.

“Oh, I am going out tonight,” I said. “I have plans.”

“Well, do you want to work for a few hours and kind of get to know everybody?”

Right there they gave me a locker and I worked from three to eight. I had been nervous about the place being so much bigger than Cinnamon’s, but I thought, Well, this isn’t too bad.

Um, Stormy, that’s because shit doesn’t happen until after that. The next time I came in, I worked a night shift and was overwhelmed. There were forty-five girls working when I was used to six or seven a night, and there were three real stages instead of one the size of a bed. Upstairs had real VIP rooms, and you didn’t have to sell drinks. If you wanted to do a private dance for someone in the back, you just had to raise your hand and the bouncer would run over with a box to stand on. Couldn’t forget, the floor was lava there, too!

If you walked in at ten, you were going in cold, trying to get the attention of guys when you were one of many to choose from. But that’s where the money was. There were three set shifts: three to eleven, eight thirty to two, and ten to two. Dancers had to pay a house fee for the two later shifts, with the last shift asking the highest house fee for the shortest time. A house fee is the “rent” you pay the club as a contractor occupying their space to offer your services. The same way hairstylists will often pay for their space at a salon. There was no fee if you came in at opening, because no girl wants to be there when it’s three guys.

I wanted to avoid the house fee but wanted to maximize profit, so for the first five months, I worked the three-to-eleven shift, clocking out just as many girls were getting there. Then I got smarter and I would work a double, starting at three in the afternoon and not leaving until two in the morning. I could skip the house fee, establish my guys, and stay with them when the later girls rolled in.

I was a machine and got up to working six nights a week, with at least five of them being doubles. If I wasn’t at work, I was spending money, and who wanted to do that? Plus, I truly loved dancing. I had regulars, and my favorite was Bear, this big huge guy who always wore Hawaiian shirts. His white hair and beard gave him the look of a polar bear. He was definitely a creature of habit, coming in every night at midnight after finishing his job as the nighttime manager of a Benny’s Car Wash, and taking his usual spot on the top ledge to stay the last couple of hours. Once I saw he came in every night, I always made a point of dancing for him. Bear was never a big spender. He would tip a five onstage, and he only got table dances if it was a two-for-one, which they did every hour. Table dances were only ten dollars, but he always gave a twenty, and he always closed the night out with me. That meant Bear was good for between twenty-five and fifty dollars a night.

But late on a Friday or Saturday night, there’s always a guy who wants to go into a VIP room and you can get six or seven hundred dollars, so the girls would ignore Bear to make that money. Not me—I would always give Bear the last dance of the night.

Girls would be like, “This guy wants to give you a hundred dollars for a table dance.”

“No, I only dance for Bear.”

“What’s wrong with you?” was the constant refrain.

“He’s twenty dollars every night,” I said. “Every week. Every month. Do the math.” He was sensitive about things, and why be rude to him one night to get two or three hundred dollars off this guy who I’m never gonna see again? It’s the long game, and Bear taught me it.

Perhaps more than the money, doing the last dance every night with Bear meant that I would never go home in a bad mood. He wasn’t some drunk tourist thinking he could do whatever he wanted because he threw money at me.

Another guy started coming in to the club named Brian. By then I had broken up with Andy. I had given up trying to fix his darkness. Brian was handsome and tall, so preppy that he didn’t look like anyone I’d ever been with. But he was funny and we clicked in conversation. He was twenty-six, and we started dating February 7, 1998, a month before I turned nineteen.

Brian and I moved into a house we rented together, and we were very happy. We were so living the American dream that we even got a dog, a Sheltie we named Sasha.

Part of the American dream is making money. I am a firm believer in capitalism. And I noticed that the girls at the Gold Club who invested in breast implants got more tips. I was already a 36B, heading to a C, but I wanted to go bigger. There were three doctors in Baton Rouge who did everyone’s boobs, so I started comparison-shopping at the club, asking the girls who they went to and deciding whose boob work I liked best.

I chose Dr. Charles Gruenwald, a suave-looking guy with prematurely gray hair and absolutely no bedside manner. When I went for the consultation, he came in the room and said, “Lemme look at them.” Phump, off came my shirt and he was immediately hands-on, making judging grunts. I told him I wanted to go up to a 36D.

“Okay, okay,” he said. He barreled through an explanation of his proposed procedure, then jotted down a price on a piece of scrap paper. “Gonna be this much,” he said. “Let me know if you want it or not.” And he walked out.

I almost didn’t go back, but I decided to go ahead with it because he could put implants under the muscle, through incisions in my underarms. I scar really badly and wanted to avoid incisions under the breasts or on my nipples. Plus, this way I would be able to breastfeed if I ever chose to have a baby. Because they have to pop the muscle away from the bone, it’s a much more involved and dangerous surgery; some doctors just won’t do it. So, Dr. Grunts it was.

On a July morning in 1999, Brian drove me to the surgery and waited for me outside. I wasn’t really nervous—I just wanted to get it over with. I had been working even more than usual, saving up for being out of commission at the club for about two weeks. The surgery was twenty-two hundred dollars, and I bet today it would be fifteen grand easy.

Because they go in through your upper body, I knew it would take a while for the swelling to go down and for the implants to settle. The muscle has to relax and you have to massage the area as part of the recovery. You measure how far your boobs have dropped by how many fingers you can fit between your breast and your collarbone. When I woke up from surgery, it was one finger, so my boobs were way up high.

They started to look good really quickly, and I was excited for the swelling to finally go down so I could wear all the cute 36D bras I’d bought from Victoria’s Secret. But at the two-week mark, when most of the swelling was supposed to be gone, they were still huge. None of my new bras were fitting me, so I went to Victoria’s Secret and they measured me.

“Honey, you’re a triple D,” the sweet lady told me.

I almost shit my pants. I went back to Dr. Grunts. “How big are my fucking tits?” I asked. He was supposed to give me a 450 cc’s on one side and 475 on the other, because everybody’s got one bigger than the other.

He hemmed, and hawed, clearly not wanting to tell me. Finally, he opened the chart and said, “You’re 575.”

I almost shit myself again.

“I filled them up till I liked them,” he said with a shrug.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” I hissed.

“You are a very broad cavity with wide shoulders, and everyone who does that comes back and gets ’em bigger,” he said. “They looked so good that I didn’t want to cut you twice.”

That’s what stopped me from suing him, but I was a cartoon character until they settled.

It helped that I got a lot more tips. Instantly. Now I’ve gone on to win many Best Breasts trophies. And every time I accept one of those, I thank him by name. Best twenty-two hundred dollars I ever spent.

I also named my breasts because I love them so much. Thunder and Lightning. I’ve had the same implants since 1999—they’re almost old enough to drink.

For the next two years, I continued to work at the Gold Club more than sixty hours a week. I was happy making money and saving up to buy a house. I had my regulars and I never did anything illegal, mainly because I was a good girl and also because I was hopelessly naïve.

The Gold Club was well known, so they would have feature dancers come in. A feature dancer is someone who is known for her pictorials or films. She can travel all over and draws her fan base to a club. She is paid by the club, keeps her tips, and when she performs—usually about two shows a night—the other house girls all stop because the feature is the star attraction.

When features were there, I made it my mission to talk to all of them, because I wanted to be one someday. Most of them seemed standoffish and cold, and I have now learned why. It’s not necessarily the women being chilly, it’s that clubs really hate when the features try to “recruit” or give their information to get their best house girls away.

And some of them were just bitches.

The first one to show me what was possible in feature dancing on an artistic level was Leslie Wells. She wasn’t famous and didn’t care about getting into magazines or movies—she was all about the theatricality of her shows. A green-eyed blonde from Chattanooga, she could have just coasted on her looks and boobs. But her shows were so much more than that—they were mini skits that embraced the fun and humor of taking off your clothes in front of everyone. As I started to think about how I would structure my own shows, I modeled them after hers. It’s a strip club—it’s okay to smile. She quit performing and now is a wonderful playwright with two kids. I was honored to go see her and buy the costumes from some of her best shows. She said she didn’t want anyone to have them but me.

But the feature dancer who had the biggest impact on my life was Devon Michaels. A gorgeous, incredibly fit brunette, Devon was about ten years older than me and had a lot of success parlaying her centerfolds and covers into feature dancing and the best-body contest circuit. She gave me the number of the first photographer who ever shot me, Dan Sparks. I went to see him at his studio in Atlanta and he shot all my very first layouts in one day. Those pictures got me the covers of D-Cup, Gent, and Hustler’s Busty Beauties. The magazines identified me just as Stormy or Stormy Waters, my short-lived nom de porn at twenty.

Devon didn’t stop there. She believed in me and was so generous that she flew me to Tucson, Arizona, to meet Jacquie the Costume Lady, who still makes all my costumes to this day. Jacquie measured me and I bought my first five thousand dollars’ worth of spangled-out feature costumes. You might think all I need is a bikini, but that’s not how a real performer works. When you command a room—getting not just the audience’s attention but earning their tips—you need to be a sort of one-woman circus. You’re a ringmaster, clown, lion, tightrope walker, magician, and magician’s assistant all in one. Your clothes have to tell a story, and like any story there have to be layers and reveals to keep people focused on you. There’s a reason one of the first things I did when I planned out my act was to learn how to blow fire.

Devon came through with phone numbers of agents, and using the pictorials and covers that came out that summer, I booked feature dancing gigs starting in September. My boyfriend Brian was always cool about me being a dancer—after all, it’s how we met—but he didn’t like the idea of having a live-in girlfriend he never saw. We decided to split, but it was completely amicable. I kissed Sasha good-bye and started life on the road.

I needed a roadie, so I asked one of the Gold Club’s bouncers, Mac, if he wanted to come along. Mac had been a marine and was a big guy who could get volatile quickly. A bouncer should be looking to resolve all problems, but Mac could sometimes start problems in the name of protecting me.

Nowadays, I mostly fly everywhere, but back then I drove around in my Dodge Durango with a twelve-foot trailer full of my costumes. Living on the road before GPS, I learned how to use a map and figure out the best routes for time and scenery. Mac and I just went from place to place, and I learned so much in all the strip clubs. My reputation was good, and the same clubs would ask me to come back. I showed up on time, I was polite to the staff, and I think the biggest thing was that I didn’t drink. A lot of the girls got messy and would need babysitting by the end of the night.

The summer of 2001, Mac and I were at the Cheetah club in Pompano Beach, Florida. We were hanging out in the dressing room between my two shows for the night. The DJ bombed in, coming in so hot that he hit his head on a low pipe.

“You gotta come onstage right now,” he said.

“I thought I had twenty minutes,” I said.

“Pantera just walked in.”

Mac sat up. Pantera was my favorite band after Acid Bath, but they were definitely Mac’s number one.

“It’s their drum tech’s birthday,” said the DJ. “His name’s Kat, and they wanna know if you can pull him up onstage.”

“Of course!” Mac and I said at the same time. I did the show, pulling Kat up onstage to cover him in chocolate syrup. From Pantera, there was the drummer Vinnie Paul and bassist Rex Brown, along with Paul Gray from Slipknot, and Kerry King and a couple of other people from Slayer. And one more guy, a not particularly hairy tour manager they all inexplicably called Wookie. Mac got to meet them all, and he was in thrash metal heaven.

At the end of the night, the Cheetah closed and we actually stayed a little later to clean up my dressing room. (You see why clubs love me?) We got in my Dodge Durango to leave, and when we pulled around we saw the rock gods from inside sitting on the curb.

“What are they doing?” I asked Mac. “Should we offer them a ride?”

“They’re fucking Pantera,” said Mac. “They don’t need a ride.”

“Hey,” I called out the window. “Do you guys need a ride?”

“Our cab hasn’t shown up,” said Vinnie.

“Where do you need to go?” I asked.

They told me what hotel it was, and I said, “Okay, get in.” We had to lay the seats down to get everyone in the back. Once we were on the road, Vinnie Paul said, “Play something.”

Mac and I had been listening to Mötley Crüe, so I pressed Play and “Shout at the Devil” filled the air. These six or seven guys all started singing along behind me, and we did, too.

When we got to the hotel, Vinnie said to me, “Can we buy you guys a drink?”

Before I could answer, Mac jumped in. “Yes!” We went to the hotel bar, which was probably supposed to be closed, but I would learn that when you’re a rock group you can pay to keep stuff open. There were some groupies there, and Vinnie whispered in my ear, “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Depends what it is,” I said.

“There’s this girl here who won’t leave me alone,” he said. “Will you sit on my lap and hold my hand and pretend we’re together?”

I did, and we actually had a great time talking.

“Are you guys gonna come to the show tomorrow night?” he asked us. I didn’t know there was one. Mac looked at me, mouthing a subtle “Please, please, please.”

“Pssh, yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

The show was at the Sunrise Musical Theater in Miami, so I told Mac we could spend one extra night in Florida. Wookie gave us laminates, which are backstage passes that hang from lanyards. They’re magic keys at concerts. It was the Reinventing the Steel tour, so we were backstage with Slayer, Static-X, and Sepultura. Pantera opened with “Hellbound” and closed with “Primal Concrete Sledge” before coming back for an encore of “Cowboys from Hell.” There was this great moment right before the last verse when the lead singer, Phil Anselmo, who was screaming the whole show, said a very polite, “Thank you all for coming.”

Then Vinnie said backstage, “Are you coming tomorrow night?”

We were. We followed them to Orlando, where they played the Hard Rock. I realized I was following the band. It felt weird to be trailing them in my Durango with all my stuff. They liked having me around, so I sent Mac packing with my truck and trailer back to Louisiana, and I stayed on Pantera’s bus for two weeks.

There were three buses, with Anselmo and his girlfriend Stephanie staying holed away by themselves on his own bus. Then there was the crew bus. And the bus I was on, which had Vinnie Paul and Wookie. It was the fun bus, a mix of the band and crew. Those two weeks were what got me addicted to the tour life. Waking up in a new city every day and sitting on the bus sharing stories with these great people.

It was Almost Famous. In fact, there was one morning that I got up from my bunk around 6 A.M. and went down to sit in the front lounge with the bus driver. Vinnie came down, then Grady the guitar tech—they probably hadn’t even been to bed yet. I was watching the world go by out the window when they started singing “Tiny Dancer” to me, just like the band does on the bus in Almost Famous. A couple of others joined; these were metal guys serenading me with “Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man.” In the movie, teenage Patrick Fugit’s character says to Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane near the end of the song, “I have to go home.” She holds up a hand to his face, like she’s casting a spell. “You are home,” she says.

We were this new circus family. Every night girls came on the bus. Some of the guys used to collect Polaroids of the girls, and it was my job to take the pictures. I took good shots, I have to say, because I genuinely wanted the girls to look their best for rock chick posterity. Some of them were crazy, though. One night a girl tried to steal the towel rack from the bus bathroom. We had to tackle her. Another time these girls came on—one beautiful and one as ugly as her attitude. They kicked off the ugly one, but the pretty one wanted to stay. In fact, she wanted to leave with us. As soon as the bus started in the giant empty arena parking lot, one tiny set of headlights turned on in the distance. Then the car came at us like something out of Christine. Our driver floored it, but she kept coming and almost rammed the bus. She was screaming out the window, “Give me back my friend!” And the pretty one didn’t want to go! Sorry. Maybe if you’d just been nicer.

When we got to Cleveland, Billy Corgan and the country singer David Allan Coe came to the show. Billy was standing next to me up front, singing along to every Pantera song but doing it in his Smashing Pumpkins voice. It was so surreal. There were a lot of pyrotechnics and concussive blasts in the show, and I had memorized the time from seeing the concert over and over. When I knew a loud noise was about to hit, I would elbow Billy and signal him to put his fingers in his ears. He was so cute about it. We all went to the Crazy Horse strip club after, and Billy came along. When the night was over, the back of Billy’s Range Rover was blocked by a pole, and we had to move it so all the extra people we’d been collecting could get in the back. I was the only one sober enough to drive, so I got behind the wheel super cocky, but I accidentally put it in reverse and backed it right into a pole. He wasn’t mad at all, and there was no physical damage—just to my ego.

I had decided Chicago would be where I left the circus. I needed to get back to work. We had a night off, so we got rooms at the Ritz. They’d wanted to stay at the Four Seasons, but the last time they were there Dimebag Darrell from Pantera threw a chair out the window and the band was banned. We got in at midmorning, and we went straight to bed. I was staying with Wookie and for some reason I fucked him. It was just a friend thing, but we passed out right after and slept all day.

We had a band dinner at this really nice steak house in the city, and the restaurant had a dress code that required jackets on the men. Fortunately, the restaurant loaned the guys some to wear. The rocker tour uniform was T-shirts, camo shorts, and combat boots—so imagine that topped with stuffy suit coats. We all strolled in like we were crashing the debutante ball, and they ended up getting so drunk. Kerry King from Slayer sat to my right, tattoos all over his bald head. Let the record show that throughout this whole ruckus, Kerry had impeccable table manners. He was the only one who knew which fork went with which dish.

There was a guy playing the harp, and at one point, Rex from Pantera went over and dropped a few hundreds in his bowl. He took the harp away and started playing it like a bass. I was just amazed they didn’t kick us out. Maybe Kerry’s good manners saved us.

After one last concert, it was time for me to go back to my own tour. My friend Exotica and her roadie husband, Vinnie, were throwing a Fourth of July party at their house in a residential area outside Chicago. Exotica was a gorgeous Latin feature dancer, and she said I could stay with her until Mac arrived with my Durango and trailer. “My friends will drop me off in the morning before the party,” I told her. “I can help set up.”

We partied all night in Chicago, and at 6 A.M., our huge tour bus rolled into Exotica’s white-picket-fence neighborhood. We parked, and the bus heaved a sigh of air brakes that I am sure woke the whole neighborhood, because suddenly people were all at their front doors. Exotica and her husband came out, too, staring with their mouths open.

Pantera and all my friends got off the bus to help me get my stuff out of the bay. Each gave me one last hug.

I walked up to Exotica. “Who are your friends?” she asked me, dumbfounded.

“They’re the best,” I said. “The best.”

Mac and I started a romance on the road, and as we became more of a couple, he would get jealous. We fought a lot, and sometimes it got physical. There was a night I climbed through the window of a bathroom I’d locked myself in to get away from him. I wasn’t having that, so I fired him and broke up with him all at once. We’re cool now, but back then we just weren’t good together.

I found Jay, a smaller guy who wasn’t there for security but was great as a roadie. He could drive twenty-four hours without stopping and could size up a club within a minute of walking in. He was a bass player, and I have a thing for bass players, so I fell for him, too.

I’d clocked two years of feature dancing and was killing myself driving all over. I was making a hundred dollars a show before tips and doing fifteen shows a week. The problem was that I had topped out on rate. I’d done just about every magazine except Penthouse and Playboy. And the only way to bump your rate up after you top out is to do films. Devon Michaels, who opened so many doors for me, was in the same boat. She called me one day and told me, “I’m going to go to L.A. I’ve decided to do porn.”

“Oh, my God, wow,” I said. I didn’t have any negative views of people who worked in the adult entertainment industry. In fact, I loved porn and had a collection of DVDs. This was before the internet made porn so readily accessible—you had to want it to see it.

“You should come with me,” she said.

“I’ve never…”

“I’ll buy your ticket,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

Sold. We both flew to L.A. on May 1, 2002. Right off the plane that very first day, she was booked to do an all-girl sex scene for Makin’ It, a film for Wicked Pictures. It starred Stephanie Swift playing a young singer trying to break into show business. Wicked was actually my favorite of the various movie studios. They made very cinematic films that blended action and story, many of which were remakes of popular mainstream films or send-ups of genres. My favorite film was Dream Quest, a 2000 Wicked production starring Jenna Jameson as a modern woman drawn into a fairy tale. It was directed by Brad Armstrong, who would be shooting Devon that day. Brad was also a performer, and I found him incredibly hot.

Devon asked if I wanted to come along, and of course I did. That day I learned what I still tell people: “You don’t want to go to set. It’s going to ruin porn for you forever.” It’s not that it’s somehow degrading or gross—it’s that there’s nothing spontaneous about it whatsoever. Everyone is there to do a job. I saw this way up close right away, because Brad said I could sit in a little closet on set, just three feet from the four-way but still out of the shot. It was the film’s star Stephanie Swift, Nicole Sheridan, my friend Devon, and another girl pretending to be in the dressing room of a Coyote Ugly–type bar. They’re dancers and they’re counting their tips, which naturally leads to getting out dildos.

These four girls were going at it like they were inventing girl-on-girl rough sex. The grunts, the cries, the “yeah, yeah, yeahs.” One girl was using a double-ended dildo to fuck another one doggy-style while also thrusting the opposite end into herself. Devon was helpfully spreading the ass cheeks of the receiver while getting fucked with another dildo. It takes a village.

Stephanie was going, “Unh unh unh unh” at the top of her lungs when Brad said, “Cut.”

They all broke character, relaxing their bodies with double-headed dildos still inside them.

“Do you think the weather is gonna be good this week?” Stephanie asked, as the camera guy switched tapes. Back then you had to do that for every twenty minutes of film.

“I think so,” said Nicole, just as nonchalant. “I don’t think there’s rain coming, so it might just stay humid.”

The tech said, “Ready,” and they were right back at it.

“Oh, God, yes, yes, yes, yes!” screamed Nicole, in time with each thrust of a dildo.

After a while, Brad said, “Cut. I want to move the lighting.” While the men on the crew saw to that, the girls checked their nails.

“Is anyone gonna be at that party Friday?” said Nicole.

“Oh, it’s so far out,” said Stephanie. “I don’t know if—”

“Action,” said Brad.

“Yeah, like that!” yelled Stephanie, falling right back into heavy-breathing rhythm. “Just like that, you fucker! Oh, God, oh, God!”

On set, you’re not just breaking the fourth wall. You’re pissing on it, then knocking it over with a bulldozer. But I still found it interesting, so when I went back the next day I agreed to shoot a scene as a clothed extra. They did my makeup and it was the very first time I’d ever had it professionally done. And it was the first time I ever wore false eyelashes.

“These are so heavy,” I said, my eyelids drooping down and then flashing up as I got used to them. How do you people do it? I wondered. Now I can put them on while driving!

I got on camera and these little murmurs went up in the crew. Jake Jacobs, the camera operator, called Ric Rodney, the lighting guy, to look.

“Hunh,” they said, each turning their heads. Ric came over, adjusted a light near me, and Jake nodded.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Jake. “You’re pretty, but you’re beautiful on camera.”

I didn’t take it the wrong way. Jake would shoot every single movie I would do. Ric is still my guy when it comes to lighting my films.

Brad Armstrong came over to me. “Do you do movies?”

“Well, no,” I said. “But I love them.”

“I think the owner of the company would like to meet you,” he said. “Maybe talk to you about a contract.”

I didn’t even know there was such a thing. When you do a contract, you work exclusively for that company and have job security and a company promoting you like the old MGM studio system. Jenna Jameson had been a contract girl for Wicked. I knew Devon really wanted a contract and didn’t want to be a freelancer.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just here with Devon. Isn’t Devon incredible? She—”

“We should go out tonight and get dinner,” Brad said. When I didn’t immediately answer, he added: “The three of us.”

“Okay.”

“Where do you wanna go?” he asked.

“I want to see the Sunset Strip,” I said, which made him burst out laughing because that is such a touristy thing to want to do. “I need to see the Whisky a Go Go, ’cause that’s where Mötley Crüe played and they lived above it.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

That night Brad picked us up in a convertible Camaro that had the Wicked logo across it. It was the Wicked pace car, and the company was printing money at that point. We went to the Saddle Ranch Chop House, which has a rock-and-western atmosphere. I rode the mechanical bull, of course, and I won five hundred dollars for managing to stay on. Brad told me later that as he was watching me ride the bull he was like, in a villain voice, “I must be in her.”

The three of us went back to his house, and the whole time I’m thinking, This is going to be two firsts. My first threesome, and my first one-night stand. Adding to that, this was the first time I’d ever had sex with someone who I considered a man. Someone who wasn’t my age. Brad is about fourteen years older than me—and he owns a house. It didn’t get more adult to me than that.

We were sitting in a circle on his bed, kissing and making out. Brad pulled his dick out, and it was the biggest dick I’d ever seen up to that point. Now, in Pornland, I can now tell you it is very average. But it was the biggest penis I’d ever seen.

I fell backward off the bed and hit my head. “There’s no way that’s gonna fit!” I yelled. (Reader, it fit.)

Brad offered to help me meet with the owner of Wicked, and I took him up on it. But first I was set to go along with Devon, who was shooting a girl-girl scene in American Girls: Part Two for a company called Sin City. The second girl canceled, and Devon panicked because she was scared to work with someone she didn’t know.

I’m a girl’s girl, so I got roped into it. The premise of this girl-girl scene was typical porn: We are hiking when my friend sprains her ankle out on the trail. I give her a shoulder to lean on, and when that doesn’t fully do the job, I comfort her with my vagina. The film was directed by Michael Raven, who later came to Wicked as a director. The cameraman on set that day was François Clousot, who I just shot with the other day, and the makeup artist was a girl named Shelby Stevens, who left the business but I swear I was just texting a few minutes ago. Once you click with me, I’m with you for life.

We shot in Dry Gulch Ranch, this rocky, desert location in the Santa Monica Mountains of West Malibu. There were all these terms they use in porn that I didn’t know. The first was “Wildlife!” They yelled that out, and it just means there’s a bug or creature wandering onto the set. They weren’t kidding: There was a scorpion wandering the set that day, and I saw my first tarantula.

Then I heard Michael say, “Okay, thirty seconds to build up to a FIP.”

I froze. “What’s a FIP?” I yelled. “I don’t know if I do that!” It’s a fake orgasm, a “Fake Internal Pop.” The term is used in softcore filmmaking because you can’t show guys coming in those films, so it’s simulated. Usually it’s for boy-girl scenes, obviously, but it’s also used for girls.

The next day, a Friday, Brad made good on his offer to introduce me to the owner of Wicked. He seemed interested, but he’s not someone who really shows his cards. I was scheduled to take a red-eye back to Baton Rouge the next day, and Devon was flying out for a dance booking. I was staying at Brad’s—so much for a one-night stand—and right before he took me and Devon to the airport, he pulled me aside.

“If you decide to stay, I could make you a star,” he said. “Whether or not you sign with Wicked, someone will sign you. And you will go on to make a minimum fifteen thousand dollars a month.”

“What?” I said, immediately doing the math. One hundred eighty thousand dollars a year sounded like a gold mine.

“I’ll help you if you want me to,” he said. “But this is kind of your shot.”

We got to LAX, which was fucking terrifying to someone who’d never really been by herself in a big city. Brad got my carry-on out of the back of the Camaro, and I said good-bye. I promised I’d be back someday. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

Devon’s flight was first, so I waited with her until she left. I thanked her for the millionth time for always doing so much for me. And then it was just me, all alone. I sat at the gate for my flight to Baton Rouge. I looked at the sign and sighed. They were boarding first class. I was way in the back. I looked at my bag, then the Baton Rouge sign again.

I heard Brad’s voice in my head. “This is kinda your shot.”

This is my shot, I thought. I knew I was only going to get one.

I grabbed my bag and I walked out of the airport. I wasn’t even old enough to rent a car, I didn’t have a credit card, and I didn’t have any money. I called the only number that I had in L.A.

Brad Armstrong answered on the first ring.

“I just walked out of the airport,” I said.

He gave me the name of a Mexican restaurant and bar he was heading to in Calabasas. “Take a cab there and I’ll meet you.”

It was a Cinco de Mayo party, and some of the biggest names in the porn industry were there. Brad paid my fare, then walked me around, introducing me to all these amazing people. I went home with him that night and we lived together as a couple for the next fourteen months. I left everything else behind, and I had my car shipped from Baton Rouge.

Because he liked me, Brad thought Wicked would probably sign me. But he also knew that no matter how respected he was in the business, I had to at least shoot a lead before Wicked would make me a contract star. With his clout, he walked me right in to meet the directors at the companies that he wanted me to work with. I never had an adult agent, and I never had an adult manager. I can hear you thinking, “Oh, here’s where she gets screwed.” Quite the opposite. I am the first to admit I was handed this golden ticket. I was in the right place at the right time and I grew the right set of balls in the moment so that I would not miss my shot.

I never had to climb the ranks or do the hard stuff. Or do scenes without a condom. I’ve been in the adult industry all this time and I’ve never had a dirty test, which is when you test positive for chlamydia or gonorrhea. I don’t have herpes, which is crazy, because a lot of people do, especially in the business. And it’s because Brad took me by the hand and walked me into the office of people who he trusted and he knew would take care of me. I only did top-shelf projects, and I was usually the lead. I know that was a source of a lot of jealousy for people who had really done their due diligence and had worked their way up. Later, when Adult Video News nominated me for Performer of the Year—which is like a Best Actress Oscar in our industry— they asked the people nominated to do on-camera interviews that they teased until the end of the awards show.

In the interview, they asked me, “Why do you think you deserve to win Performer of the Year?”

“I fucking don’t,” I said. “I’m embarrassed to be here—I didn’t earn this. There are girls who are literal sexual acrobats and have been in the trenches. I’ve been a cream puff.” They never nominated me again. That’s my problem, I’m too honest. But I think the girls in that room could look at me and say, “At least the bitch is honest.”

When I started doing films, Brad gave me some advice. “You should stick to doing girl-girl and solo stuff at first,” he said. “Pace yourself. Because if Wicked decides to give you a contract, they’re gonna want your first boy-girl.” Brad also wanted to be the one to do my first boy-girl scene with me. He wasn’t giving that up.

When an opportunity arose to do a scene with him as a lead in a Wicked film, I took it. For Heat, Brad wrote me as Charlotte, a Louisiana vixen—hmmph—who plots to steal eighty-seven thousand dollars from a drifter con artist whose car breaks down in my little town. I found doing a boy-girl scene to be easier for me than girl-girl. Just logistically, when it comes to kissing another woman, you’ve got two sets of lashes hitting, the lipstick all over the place. Guys usually have no ego with me, whereas girls… Let’s be honest, this is a business where your income and popularity are directly related to how pretty you are.

By the time I did Heat, I was blonder. I’d noticed that the head of Wicked preferred blondes, and the more blond I got, the more work I got. Finally, I went fully blond, and it’s amazing what blond hair and big boobs instantly do, by the way. Everyone thinks you’re stupid, but they sure want you around. Sure enough, two months into my career, Wicked signed me and I had to finalize a stage name. My initial thought was Stephanie Storm, but they said it was too close to Stephanie Swift, another actress.

“Why don’t you keep Stormy?” the boss said. “There’s never been a Stormy, and it just suits you.”

Going with Stormy felt weird. Brad was born Rod Hopkins. Marilyn Monroe was Norma Jean Mortenson. If I had to be this larger-than-life character onscreen, could I really do it as Stormy? But I went with it, and chose Daniels as a last name, a tribute to a Jack Daniel’s ad I saw that called it “a Southern favorite.” You can take the girl out of her Dodge Durango and hitch-trailer…

Magazines were really huge back then, and Brad told me I needed to start meeting photographers. “You can shoot with them and increase your profile without saturating the video market,” he said. “Are there any photographers that you know?”

“Not in L.A.,” I said. “The only photographer that I know by name out here isn’t interested in shooting me.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because I’ve submitted Polaroids for years and they’ve never even responded.”

“Well, who’s that?” he asked. “I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to shoot you.”

“You have to say that because we’re fucking,” I said. “Her name’s Suze Randall.”

“Suze?” he said. “Let’s go to her house right now.”

“What? You know Suze?”

“She shoots me all the time,” he said. “She’ll shoot you.”

Suze Randall is a legend in photography, not just for being so talented, but for being a trailblazer. Born in England, she was initially a model, then became Playboy’s first female staff photographer and also one of the first women to direct porn. I was so nervous for the entire ride to her place, a thirty-acre ranch outside Malibu. As we approached, I saw she had horses, and my heart leapt a little.

She greeted us in riding pants, a dirty shirt, and a Q-tip shock of white hair. She immediately grabbed at Brad’s crotch. “Did you bring me a new little sluttie?” she asked, her demented singsong British accent making her sound like some horny headmistress. I was instantly in love. “Ohhhh,” she purred. “We need to get her on the calendar right away.”

The next time I was at the ranch, we shot in her studio. Before Suze even showed up, there were hours of prep work on lighting and wardrobe. Emma Nixon, a former model, did my makeup, and once again I was blinking from the weight of fake lashes. Finally, Suze came in and sat on a skateboard so she could quickly roll back and forth to get the angles.

“That’s right, show ’em your pink little twattie,” she said. “That’s a good little piggy. Piggy, piggy, piggy.” She could never get away with that now, but after I was over the initial horror, I fell deeper in love. Especially when I saw the finished product. She went on to shoot me fifty times and got me my first layout in Penthouse.

Once again, Brad had opened doors for me. I began tagging along to all of his sets to watch him direct. He was great at what he did, but writing all those scripts didn’t seem to be his favorite part, so he sometimes fell behind. We were sitting in bed together and he was grimacing at the screen.

“I could write you a script,” I said.

He gave me such a side-eye and ignored me.

“No, I’m a writer,” I said.

He laughed at me. Just fully laughed in my face. Now I understand because I have had a thousand people say those sentences to me and not one of them gave me something remotely usable. He’d been pestered for years by people saying, “I have an idea,” thinking it’s so easy to write a porno. I get it and forgive him now, but in the moment? No.

“Go fuck yourself!” I yelled. I went and got my laptop, then stamped my feet down the hallway to the other room to start working on a script. I gave it to him a couple of days later. The look on his face is forever burned into my brain, and I go to it when I am blocked in writing. It was a look of Holy shit, she actually can write. He bought it from me right then and there for seven hundred dollars. He shot the film and then knew exactly how to tease another one out of me. “Think you can do it again?”

I wrote another script, and another script, and another. He was in heaven because he didn’t have to write. I was in heaven because I got to write and got paid to write. Then the other directors at Wicked, who were now Jonathan Morgan and Michael Raven, wanted to buy scripts. I started writing for them. The word got out in the industry that I was a really good writer, at which point Wicked put the kibosh on that and added writing to my contract. So now I was a contract star and contract writer. I could write for anybody in the company but not outside it. After that, I wrote every Wicked movie that I starred in.

When I write, the movie plays in my head as I work. I see it as I write, and because of my memory, when it’s time for the shoot I remember every beat and angle of the film I envisioned when I first wrote the script in longhand. This isn’t a knock on anyone at Wicked, because they’re all fantastic directors, but it was like I had already watched my movie in my head and I hated not seeing it exactly that way on the screen. It could be as simple as imagining the girl wearing a pink dress, not a yellow one, but some of it was bigger changes, and I started to get in huge fights with Brad.

“I’m just gonna have to have you stop coming to set,” he yelled at me after one too many objections from me.

“You’re ruining my vision!” I yelled. Oh, gosh, that sentence haunted me for years. “Don’t ruin her vision” became a running joke in the company. I got in a huff, let’s call it a hufflepuff, and I went in to the owner of Wicked and convinced him that I knew how to direct. Just once I wanted to see if I could take something from my head, to paper, to life. And he said yes. Keep in mind they were still making money to burn if they wanted to. No one could afford to take this risk these days, but back then a thirty-five-thousand-dollar gamble to appease the star was nothing.

So now I had to do it.

I wrote a script called One Night in Vegas with Kaylani Lei, one of our contract stars, in mind. The first day on set, I sat down at the monitor and realized that I’d done the blocking and told everyone what to do, but I didn’t know how to start. Everybody was listening and looking at me and I was like, Oh shit.

Jake Jacobs, the cameraman on my first day as an extra and then my first Wicked film, was standing right there by me with the camera.

“What do I say now?” I whispered to him.

He didn’t blow my cover or rat me out. He whispered, “You say, ‘Rolling, speeding.’”

“Rolling!” I yelled. “We’re speeding.”

He waited a beat, then whispered, “Now say ‘Action.’”

I swallowed.

“You can do it,” he whispered.

“Action,” I said in a voice only loud enough for him to hear.

“Say it louder.”

“Action!”

Thank you, Jake. Halfway through that day, we were shooting a party scene with a bunch of people coming in and out. Of course, I had to make my first movie as difficult as possible with extras and moving parts. As I was standing at the top of this staircase looking down to figure out blocking and timing, I suddenly realized that everyone was looking at me and I was commanding a room of twenty people. I was twenty-two years old, and I had the epiphany that so many people go through life never having that moment where you can say, “This is it. This is what I was born to do.” And I’ve been drunk with power ever since.

One Night in Vegas turned out great, and when the owner of the movie company saw the finished film, directing was quickly added to my contract. Now I was a Wicked contract star, writer, and director.

“Who the hell is that?” I whispered to Jessica Drake. We were on set for a movie I wrote called Highway. We were Wicked’s most successful contract stars and had hit it off. I had written us a buddy movie just so we could have fun together. It was based on Thelma & Louise, and I chose Michael Raven to direct. We were shooting at Four Aces Movie Ranch, a set you’ve seen in a hundred movies, with a fifties-style diner and motel. It’s an hour northeast of L.A. in the middle of nowhere, so if you’re there, you’re there for a reason.

“One of them’s got a camera,” said Jessica. “They press?”

“I’m gonna find out,” I said.

The guys had walked over to Lyle and Jim, who were Wicked’s in-house art department. They were hugging, all buddy-buddy.

“Who are they?” I said, not looking at them.

“This is Keith Munyan and Dean Keefer,” Lyle said. “Keith is shooting the box cover.”

Now, I am a creature of habit, as you know. I don’t like change. Brad Willis had shot the stills for my previous box covers and publicity. I didn’t know that Brad had moved on to doing more design than photography, I just knew that it looked like Lyle and Jim had hired their friends to shoot our box cover. I was sure they sucked, and I told Jessica as much when I walked back.

“I don’t really like people photographing me when I haven’t seen their work,” she said. “How do we know he’s not gonna try to sell the photos?” She was older than me and had been in the business longer. I always trusted her opinion and admired her business acumen.

“You’re right,” I said. “He might make me look like shit. I need to see his test photos. Let him audition.” Or quit.

I sat for Keith that first day in the corner of the diner set in the ranch. I sat in a booth across from a weathered bumper sticker on the wall reading AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. Keith is a talker, and I immediately picked up a strong Louisiana accent. I resolved not to acknowledge it or speak to him to reveal mine.

He showed me the first shot on his camera. I smiled and yelled to Jessica through the window. “Okay, we’re gonna be nice to this guy now,” I said. “We’re gonna keep him.”

“What part of Louisiana are you from?” I asked.

“How did you know?” Keith asked.

“I’m from Baton Rouge,” I said.

“I’m from the swamps.”

We laughed, kindred spirits. Keith and Dean were in their forties, partners in business and in life. They’re both good-looking guys, and Keith was a model before he was a photographer. When I become friends with someone, I am all in. I practically say, “We’re gonna be friends now. We’re gonna get bunk beds and do activities.”

I had a shoot coming up, just some content for my website. My photographer canceled and I immediately thought of Keith. I did a day alone with him, and they were the best pictures ever taken of me up to that point. Pretty much instantly, I told Wicked and anyone else who wanted photos, “No one else is allowed to shoot me.” From that day forward, just about every professional photo ever taken of me was by Keith. He had never shot layouts for magazines, and many editors understandably didn’t trust someone they hadn’t worked with before. But I told them that if they wanted me they had to hire Keith Munyan. I didn’t care if it was Penthouse, or Spencer Gifts doing my calendar. He’s with me.

My bond with Keith and Dean proved to be even stronger than friendship. I became so close to them that they finished raising me. I call them my gay dads, and I mean that. If my biological father gets to call himself my dad, then I sure as hell get to say who my real dads are.

When Brad Armstrong and I broke up, it was Keith who took care of me. I could see it coming, but I didn’t anticipate just how he would do it. Brad was often hard to read and not really affectionate. He would build a little wall of pillows between us on the bed when we slept because my instinct is to cuddle. I also knew that the women he was with had a shelf life of one year. I was pushing it at fourteen months.

One day he mentioned offhand that he was taking Jessica Drake wardrobe shopping for her new movie. I didn’t think much of it, but it put me in the mood to check out clothes that I might want some of my stars to wear. I went to the Westfield Topanga Mall, and just like that day that I saw my high school boyfriend holding hands with that pretty girl at the coffee shop, there were Brad and my buddy Jessica, holding hands as they went up the escalator. I could tell by the way they were acting that this wasn’t new.

I didn’t chase them up the escalator. Ever the director, I wanted the confrontation scene to be just right. I ran to another escalator and went up just so I could do a sneak attack on them.

“Well, well, well,” I said, “this is some interesting wardrobe shopping. How long have you guys been fucking?” Jessica said nothing and couldn’t even look at me. I was as hurt about being betrayed by my friend as by my boyfriend cheating. I wanted to kill her, and Brad had to talk me down. And I left.

In the car, I called my dad Keith. He told me to come over right away. When I got there, I hugged him. “It’s now official,” I said with a sigh. “You’re my favorite person. There’s no competition.”

Keith remained my favorite person, even when I woke up accidentally married to someone I’d dated all of two weeks.

I was still heartbroken by Brad and Jessica when I started dating a director named Pat Myne, who I knew by his real name, Bart Clifford. He was in his late thirties and a really nice guy, and had been married to another performer, Shelbee Myne, before divorcing in 1999. Bart and I had been seeing each other for two weeks when we were both in Las Vegas for an adult entertainment convention in 2003. That night in Vegas, I did something very uncharacteristic: I drank. Which is to say that I tried to drown my sorrow about Brad and Jessica in a vat of tequila. The next morning, I woke with my head pounding and my makeup artist friend Christine standing over me holding a marriage license.

“What the fuck is this?” she screamed.

I didn’t remember, but I have since seen photos of Bart and me at a drive-through chapel. I had pink stripes in my hair, which speaks to my insanity at the time. I found Bart in the hotel, and we had to get used to the idea that we were married.

We never really did get used to that idea. I made a go of it because he had a preteen daughter from a previous relationship, Taylor, who he saw quite a bit of. I grew to love her, but Bart and I were only together a year before we decided it was best to split and that what happened in Vegas really just should have stayed in Vegas.

Christine, my friend who informed me I was married, was always urging me to talk to my mother. She was otherwise a very sensible person, but I knew that idea was nuts. But Christine had a very good and healthy relationship with her mother and her grandmother. They have been close her whole life. She couldn’t get her head around the fact that I wouldn’t talk to my mom. Society also drills into you the importance of family. “But that’s your mother,” we hear. “That’s blood!” No matter how toxic it is, we’re supposed to just drink the poison, and maybe this time they won’t let you down. There is so much pressure to honor blood ties, when really my chosen family is the people who have always done right by me.

But there was no convincing Christine. One day we were in New Orleans for work. I was competing in the Gold G-String Awards at the Penthouse Club, which had taken over the Gold Club space. I was there with my roadie Scotty and my stepdaughter, Taylor, who was about twelve and off school for spring break. I wanted her to see New Orleans, and I had all my days free during the trip. Christine was there when my mom’s number popped up as an incoming call. I recoiled from the phone, but she insisted I pick it up. When I did, my mom told me she had seen an advertisement about me and the show. It’s one of the biggest feature dancer contests of the year, and she wanted to come see me. She had seen my show, showing up when I was in Baton Rouge and New Orleans; she loved the reactions and she told everyone in the bar she was my mother. “Don’t you give my baby a dollar!” she’d scream. “You give her a twenty!” Any disapproval she had of my life paled in comparison to the attention it brought her.

I initially said no to her attending out of instinct, but Christine convinced me I should give her a chance. I called her back to lay some ground rules before she drove the fifty minutes from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. “You can’t stay the night, okay?” I said. “We have two hotel rooms and all my costumes. Me, Christine, and Taylor are sharing a room, and my roadie Scotty has his own room. With all of the makeup, all of the costumes—there’s no room in this La Quinta Inn for you.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” she said.

“No, no, you cannot stay,” I said. If I had said, “Don’t wear black,” she would insist she was on her way to a funeral and needed to. She only wanted something when I wouldn’t give it to her. But I was adamant, because I didn’t know how much exposure I wanted my stepdaughter to have to my mother. Or me when I’m around my mother. I needed to be able to say, “Okay, we’re going to bed, you can leave now.”

I was suspicious as soon as I saw she arrived with a bag.

“What’s that for?”

“Oh, you know, just in case.”

I made eye contact with Christine, who smiled. My mom was on her best sweetie-pie behavior. Butter wouldn’t melt.

“Sheila’s so nice,” Christine told me while my mom wandered around the room, clearly scoping out a place to thwart me and stay the night. “What’s the big deal?”

I turned when my roadie Scotty walked into the room. It had never occurred to me to mention to my mom that he was black. “Scotty,” I said, “this is my mom, Sheila.”

“Ooooooooh,” she said. “My baby’s made it. She has her own black man.”

All I heard was a thud as Christine dropped something behind me. I watched the look on Scott’s face change from certain he had misheard to angry to “Who is this woman?”

I was prepping for my show that has this big huge Smokey the Bear as a comic thing. In the show, I light a campfire and he comes out and says, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” And he “pees” on it with a fake penis. Well, TSA had taken my fake penis out of my bag and kept it. I was trying to make one with a ketchup bottle, but we needed something dark to cover it so it wouldn’t be bright red or yellow on stage. None of us had dark socks—except my mom. She gave us one, we cut a hole in it, and it worked. I was super grateful and I gave her a pair of my socks in return.

“You saved the day,” Christine told my mom. I winced internally, knowing this would just feed her ego. But then I wondered why I couldn’t just let my mother have this moment. Maybe Christine was right.

The show went great, but I could see her in the audience and I noticed she was having a couple of drinks. My mother does not drink, so I knew what she was up to: this was a manipulative tactic, because then it would mean she couldn’t drive. When she said just that, I was very direct. “We’re all going to Denny’s and you’re gonna eat some fucking pancakes and drive your fucking ass home.”

“Oh, I could just lay down in your bed until you get back.”

“Nope,” I said. “No.”

The Denny’s was attached to the hotel and we got there at two o’clock in the morning. I first went up and checked on Taylor, who was sleeping soundly. I went back down and there were a bunch of other performers there, too. We got a bunch of tables together and all sat to eat like a family.

Except my mother, who sat sniffling, going into baby talk. I had forgotten she would do that to people when I was little. She started to cry and said, “I don’t know why Stormy doesn’t like me.”

She was putting on a performance, and I knew it, but people who didn’t know her as I did were horrified and thought I was terrible. Everyone but Scotty, who could see right through her. Halfway through the meal, she upped the drama of her scene with an exaggerated cry to the heavens. She stopped short, looked for reactions, and then continued.

“Are you okay?” asked Christine.

“Don’t even talk to her,” I said. “She can sit there and cry.”

Everyone just wanted to leave, but I said, “Nope, I am just gonna sit here and finish my waffle.” Never have I sipped orange juice so slowly. Finally, I finished and the four of us headed to the stairs so she could get her bag and go home. I told her there was no room in my room because I had Taylor in my bed and Christine was in the other.

“You can sleep in Scotty’s room and use a pullout bed,” I said. I saw his head swivel, but I knew she wouldn’t take the bait.

“I’m a fine Southern woman,” she said. “I do not share rooms with black men.”

“Get your shit,” I hissed. “And then leave. You are not staying.”

The real her came through and she began screaming at me, calling me a cunt. Lights started going on in the hotel, so Christine slipped in to get her bag. I took my mother back downstairs to the parking lot to make sure she left. The hotel shared a huge parking lot with a mall, so there was this vast expanse of parking spaces. She had parked near where they were doing construction, and there was a trailer with a temporary fence around it.

She got in her car, still screaming at me. “You stole my sock, you cunt! I wish I’d aborted you!”

“Okay,” I said dismissively. “Okay. I wish you had, too. You have a good night, now.”

She took off in her car, but her rear bumper caught the end of the chain-link fence around the small construction site. The last thing I saw of my mother that night was the taillights of her Ford Escort going across the parking lot, dragging this chainlink fence that’s sparking on the asphalt. “I’m gonna go off the bridge and kill myself and it will be all your fault!” she screamed out the window. “You stole my sock!”

I went back upstairs and crept into the room. Taylor was asleep. Christine sat on her bed, bathed in light from the moon and the streetlights of the parking lot.

“I fucked up,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “yes, you did. I told you. It’s okay, you have to see it to believe it.”

“I’ll never—” she said, cutting herself off. “Yeah. Sorry I pressured you.”

“Well, payback’s a mother,” I said with a laugh. “Take it from me.”

I auditioned on a whim, not really that invested in breaking into mainstream films. It was late 2004, and Jonathan Morgan, a fellow contract director at Wicked Pictures, told me he had seen an ad for an open audition for a movie starring Steve Carrell.

“It’s called The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” he said.

“Can’t help you there,” I joked.

“They are looking for girls comfortable with nudity to play a stripper type,” he said.

“Ding ding ding! I know that girl.”

I went down to the casting cattle call in L.A. just because I thought it would be something new to do. I read for it, playing up the comedy of the writing, and I got a callback. But when I went in for the second reading, they warned me the scene had completely changed.

“Are you comfortable with your character also doing a scene in a fake porn?” asked the very nice casting agent.

“I only have a problem with the fake part,” I joked. “Why shoot a fake porn when I can just get you the license to one of my real porns?”

“Oh, well…”

“That would actually help, because it would help sell my movie, and then you guys don’t have to shoot something extra.”

“That actually makes a whole lot of fucking sense,” said the agent.

I got the part, and they got to use Space Nuts, a sci-fi send-up I starred in, but directed and written by Jonathan, who had given me the heads-up about the part. Production started in January, and I met the director, Judd Apatow. He was incredibly polite and focused on the work, but his set was fun. It felt like an extended family, and each time I met someone new, I got the backstory on how they joined the fold. I particularly hit it off with the on-set producer Shauna Robertson, who had met Judd while executive-producing Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which she got because she did such an amazing job producing Elf. Shauna is this little California chick with honey-blond hair and such great energy. She’s exacting, and even if she has ten different to-dos going in her head, she has this calmness to her. There’s never a moment when she is not drawing you in with a sense of “Isn’t this cool that we get to do this?”

My second day on set, she came to me with a proposition. “There’s this new guy on set who’s known Judd for years,” she said. “He comes from television, but this is his first real role in a film. We want to prank him. You can say no—totally no big deal, but it’s going to be epic.”

“I’m in,” I said. Nothing makes me happier than pranking someone. Or doing something where the guaranteed outcome is “epic.”

“Okay,” she said, grabbing my arm with excitement. “So, he knows there’s a famous porn star on set named Stormy, and we want to tell him you’re a big fan of his from his TV show. The story is that we need you to come back to do this reshoot but you said you’d only come back if you could meet him.”

“Got it,” I said.

“You’ve insisted he go to your trailer and take a picture with you,” Shauna said. “When he gets there, we want you in a bathrobe with champagne. Be, like, super creepy.”

“I can do super creepy.”

“We had the tattoo lady on set make a fake tat to put on your boob. It’s of his face. When you make him really uncomfortable, we want you to whip out your boob and ask, ‘Do you like my tattoo?’ We’re going to have cameras up to tape the whole thing.”

“Even more in.”

“Oh, God, I love you. His name is Seth Rogen and the show you loved is Freaks and Geeks.”

Seth was hysterically awkward in the face of crazy me, and the prank went so well they made it a DVD extra on the unrated version of 40-Year-Old Virgin titled “My Date with Stormy.” Because I did that, I got to join the family. They didn’t even hold auditions for Knocked Up when they needed someone to do half-naked physical comedy with Seth and Paul Rudd. They went straight to the source. “I just remember that she was very smart and really strong and funny,” Judd told the Daily Beast in March of this year, “to the point where we kept asking her to do silly things in our movies.”

Judd was awesome, but I owe my movie education to Shauna. She let me tag along to all her sets, films such as Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express. She would ask if I wanted to stop by when I wasn’t working, and I probably spent a total of forty days sitting in a chair with her behind the monitor, soaking everything up like a sponge. She’ll never understand what a gift that was to me as a director. During Pineapple Express, I learned the right camera angles to convincingly shoot a fight scene. When Jonah Hill’s character flashes back to his childhood obsession with drawing dick pics in Superbad, I noted all the camera tricks they did to make it so the child actors and the dick pics were never in the same room at once! It sounds funny, but it was all this old-school trick-of-the-eye stuff that I just loved. All these things helped me grow as a filmmaker.

Shauna never asked for anything in return, except to tell me that her boyfriend Ed was a huge fan. “Do you have any new movies with you?” she would ask. Or “Can you sign this?” It got to a point that I would just show up with DVDs and glossies presigned to Ed and hope they hadn’t broken up.

They kept me around in their little family. In Pineapple Express, I played Jessica, the wife of the drug dealer played by Danny McBride. It was one the first movies he did. In the film, he references his wife who is in jail, so before production even started we had to take a ton of photos together so they could be framed about his house in the scene. Danny and I went to Echo Park in L.A. with a photographer, and I basically spent a day making out with him. They even put a bridal gown on me to fake our wedding photo. But what Danny and I loved was physical comedy. I got on his back and did a piggyback ride, then he said, “Okay, your turn.” I did it! And we shared ice cream in this very sloppy gross way and I loved every minute of it.

Later, I was about to shoot a DVD extra for the film, so I was in the makeup trailer reveling in the fact that some chick was curling my hair for me. James Franco was in the next chair, dressed like his complete pothead character but completely engrossed in his schoolbooks for his classes at UCLA. Shauna came running in, excited to see me. “Oh, my God, yes, you’re here,” she said. “Ed is stopping by for lunch.”

“I’m excited to finally meet him,” I said.

“No, he is going to freak out,” Shauna said. “Can you come say hi and take a picture? You can say no.”

“Bitch, please,” I said. “Yes, I can come by to take a picture with this Ed I feel like I know but have never met.”

“Okay, we’ll surprise him.”

About an hour later, Shauna comes over to get me.

“Ed’s here,” she says.

“Oh, great,” I said. I followed her around the corner and—hold up!—how is it that more than two years have gone by and no one tells me that Shauna’s Ed is Ed freaking Norton?

“Hi there,” I said.

Ed was so incredibly shy and said in the nicest, most genuine voice, “It is so nice to meet you.” He was so nice that I thought he was acting.

“Okay,” I said to Shauna. “Is your Ed here, or did you just get Ed Norton to prank me?”

“No, no, this is my Ed,” she said, giving him a hug. He is indeed. They got married and have two kids, and now that quintessential California chick lives in New York.

When I was in the news a lot this year, Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow came forward as sort of character witnesses for me in the media. “I’ve known Stormy Daniels a long time, and I’ll be honest, she may have mentioned some of this stuff around ten years ago,” Seth recounted to Ellen DeGeneres on her show in April. “At the time, when you asked a porn star who they’ve been sleeping with and the answer was Donald Trump, it was like the least surprising thing that she could have said.”

But I am getting ahead of myself.