Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love and Porn

CHAPTER 8 Get It Up. Get It In. Get It Off. Get It Out.

People say porn is degrading to women. I’m no fool. Of course, porn can be degrading to women. Some pornos have scenes in which a man steps on a woman’s head, which may sound freaky to you but is pretty common in the industry. It’s not one I’ve ever done because, to me, it is degrading. In other movies the men spit on women, but I won’t let anyone spit on me. Double and triple anal isn’t for me either. Putting two or three cocks in a woman’s ass is solely about degrading her. One is enough for me. Some girls don’t like getting a facial (that’s when a guy cums all over your face). But that’s a big turn-on for me. It’s so dirty that it’s hot, and I didn’t care if it ruined my makeup. There was only one rule: don’t shoot me in the eye. But it’s happened by accident and I didn’t have any hard feelings. I just said, “Get me a baby wipe, please,” and continued on. I have my rules, I play by them, I make others follow them, and the consequence is that I don’t get hurt. It’s really been as simple as “A, B, C, don’t fuck with me.”

I won’t put myself in any scene that I don’t fully enjoy doing, and I always make sure my movies are beautiful. I got into porn because I was a twenty-two-year-old free spirit who loved to get her freak on, live out wild sexual fantasies, and feel beautiful and desired. And frankly, I just love to get fucked. And it got me off. I didn’t have to fake orgasms because I was really into the sex and it was an extra turn-on to have people watching me have sex. That made me cum hard. It is empowering for me, not degrading. I can’t say what’s right and wrong for other girls. Maybe some girls actually enjoy getting spit on, and if that’s the case, then I don’t judge them. But I know what makes me feel good and what makes me feel bad and throughout my entire ten years of doing porn, I never said yes to anything that I didn’t fully and wholeheartedly want to do. Unfortunately, not all girls in porn can say the same thing and those are the films that give porn a bad name.

With my rules firmly in place and a true excitement for the industry, I hit the ground running hard. Between June and December of 1999, I was shooting two or three times a week, making $15,000 a month, and had amassed a collection of about forty movies, including Sex Island, Up and Cummers, Foot Lovers Only, The Video Adventures of Peeping Tom 22, Farmer’s Daughters Do Beverly Hills, and others. I upgraded my car from a Mazda 323 hatchback to a much nicer Honda Accord and moved out of my little apartment in Canoga Park to a fancier loft in Woodland Hills, California. I also discovered Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and could finally afford Gucci and Prada instead of Forever 21 and Steve Madden. I even upgraded my name. My given name, Linda Ann Hopkins, wasn’t going to cut it in this industry, so after trying out a few stage names, I settled on Tera Patrick.

SAY MY NAME:

Here’s the history of my various names over the years:

• LINDA ANN HOPKINS: This is my birth name. My parents actually considered naming me Florida. Yes, Florida, as in the Sunshine State. It fit with Dad’s hippie style, but Mom thought it might be too weird and liked the name Linda because it means “beautiful” in Spanish. The nurse asked, “So, is it Florida or Linda?” and Mom just settled on Linda. It was a popular name at the time.

• BROOKE MACHADO: I used this name for the foot fetish film, Foot Lovers Only. I just liked the name Brooke for a first name, so I used that. The photographer thought I looked Brazilian and said it would be cool if people thought I was from Brazil so he gave me the last name Machado.

• BROOKE THOMAS: I was shooting my very first photo layout with Suze Randall for Club magazine and the photographer’s name was Chris Thomas. He asked me to come up with a name that I liked and I said Brooke and I liked his last name, so Brooke Thomas was born. I used this name for the movie Real Sex Magazine 22 as well.

• SADIE JORDAN: This name was given to me for the movie Paradise Hotel and I don’t even remember how or why I got the name. Sometimes they just put random names on the DVD box. They do that all the time. I’m also credited as Sadie Jordan for Gallery of Sin in 1999.

• LINDA ANN SHAPIRO: I never went by the name Linda Ann Shapiro. Wikipedia.org got that wrong!

• TARA PATRICK: Misspelling! My name was misspelled as Tara instead of Tera for Crossroads, Aroused, and Real Sex Magazine 23, both in 1999, and maybe a few others.

• TERA PATRICK: I loved the name Tera because “terra” means Earth. And when I found out Carmen Electra’s real name is Tara (with an “a” not an “e”) Patrick, that made it even better. Who wouldn’t want to be named after a sex symbol like her? I began doing business as Tera Patrick in 1999, but I didn’t legally change my name to Tera Patrick until April 3, 2009.

In 1999 I was feeling like a hot, young chick on my own, and for the first time I felt responsible and in charge of my life. And I felt beautiful and confident. I thought, “It doesn’t get any better than this! I get free sex with no strings attached. And I get paid good money to do something I love.” I was enjoying life. I was free. And I was horny. My motto was: “Get it up. Get it in. Get it off. Get it out.” That was my attitude on and off the set. I just didn’t want a boyfriend at the time. I threw my idea of getting married out the window for a few years and focused on having fun and making money instead.

Three shoots stood out the most in 1999. They involved rough sex, a Lost in Translation moment, and Jenna Jameson and a big black dildo. Let me fill you in.

One of my dirty little secrets is that I really do enjoy rough sex, but only to an extent. And it’s hard to articulate what that line is until someone crosses it. Well, a porn actor who I’d rather not name in this story stepped over that line on the set of a film I refuse to name as well. He was a Puerto Rican performer who is known for being a little rough with girls and he treated me no different. I told him I liked it rough, and I didn’t mind his hands on my throat or him pulling my hair. But he did it a little too hard. He touched me a little too rough. He grabbed my hair a little too tightly. He just did everything a little too much.

But the worst part was the look in his eyes. I can normally look a man in the eyes and feel a connection. I can normally turn a guy on with that connection while we’re having sex. But when I looked into his eyes, he wasn’t there. He was blank. He had this look like he actually hated women and was fucking me out of hate, not out of lust or passion. He was a monster to me. I used my “switch” and just turned it off, did my job, and got through it. My fans tell me that scene is a hard one to watch. I don’t know because I haven’t watched it, but I’ll never forget how I felt when I left that set.

That experience didn’t dissuade me from doing more movies, though. I just learned to be more specific about what kind of rough sex I liked the next time I shot. And I learned that I could choose whom I want to, and don’t want to, work with. I was the one in charge, and I never let anyone forget that.

On a lighter note, the funniest scene in my entire career happened on the set of Angel Dust with a Spanish performer named Nacho Vidal, who had the biggest cock I’d ever seen. He was the sweetest guy ever, but his English wasn’t so great. During our scene, he had me from behind doggy-style, and I looked over at him and said, “Fuck me like a whore.”

He obviously didn’t hear me correctly or maybe he got the words confused because he started saying in his sexy porn voice, “OK, horse. You like that, horse? How’s that feel, horse?”

I started to crack up. The crew started to crack up. The director lost it. And poor Nacho got very embarrassed and confused and asked, “What? What are you laughing at?”

“Oh, honey,” I said to him. “I said whore, not horse.”

We all just lost it. The poor guy was really sensitive about his English and he thought we were making fun of him. But it was too funny to not laugh.

My third most memorable moment of 1999 was a photo shoot I did with Jenna Jameson with the French magazine Hot Video for a sexy spread titled “The Blonde Is Not Enough.” Jenna showed up with her then-boyfriend four hours late, but I didn’t care. That just left more time for me in the makeup chair with Lee Garland, who was one of my favorite makeup artists. He painted the faces of every major star in the porn industry since the late ’80s and he was known for making any girl look flawless.

Jenna and I got along great. We both joked around a lot and liked to have fun. So, for two hours, we goofed off for the cameras and had a blast. We had to act out all of these different sex positions together, including going down on each other and getting it on with a very large black dildo. We loved the dildo so much that in between photo set-ups, we’d take turns just sitting on it. Neither one of us wanted to take it out! We were cracking up the entire time, and comparing notes on how sore our necks each were from having to look up at the camera while eating each other’s pussy. Yes, neck pain is just one of the hazards of our job.

She must have liked working with me, because before leaving the set that day she gave me some advice: “You should do this series called Virtual Sex. I just did it. It’s with this woman Samantha Lewis of Digital Playground. She’ll pay you really well for it.”

“OK, Jenna. Thanks!” I replied.

An outtake from the Hot Video sessions

It was the second time that month that Samantha Lewis’s name came up. Ron Atkinson, a director and production manager in the adult industry, called me one day out of the blue on my cell (which, I kid you not, had the last four digits 6969) and said he had a friend named Samantha who was interested in doing a movie with me and that she pays top dollar.

I was always interested in working and was excited that both Jenna and Ron had vouched for this woman. A lot of money sounded good to me. The Van Nuys-based Digital Playground was a relatively new porn production company—it started just six years earlier in 1993. But if it was good enough for Jenna, it was good enough for me. I looked at it as just another movie, another fuck, and another day on a glamorous set. I was in.

So I met with Samantha and her partner at Digital Playground, Ali Joone, in December 1999 and shot Virtual Sex with Tera Patrick for them a week later. The Virtual Sex series is an interactive movie where you only see the girl performer and a guy’s penis and the viewer takes the role of the male star and can dictate which sex acts he does with the female performer. Here’s how it works: I welcome the viewer and invite him to control my actions by using buttons on his remote control. He can choose to have me tell him stories, perform fore-play, give him a blowjob, or have sex with him in a variety of positions. You can even choose the camera angles and decide whether you want me to be naughty or nice. Porn has always been at the forefront of technology, and this was an exciting, ground-breaking new format to be a part of.

Samantha asked me how much I wanted to get paid for the movie and still not having a clue about the business, I said, “Oh, $5,000 would be good.” Knowing what I know now, I probably could’ve said $50,000 since the video ended up being a top-selling DVD for the company. I even won an AVN Award for it for Best Interactive DVD. (The AVNs, put on by the industry trade magazine Adult Video News, are the Oscars of the porn industry and are held every January in Las Vegas.)

The movie turned out great, but it was not a fun shoot for me. I was not about making great movies at the time. I was about having great sex on camera, and this was not that. It was very technical and clinical and a tedious fifteen-hour workday. It was one of the hardest shoots I’ve ever done. I couldn’t really get off in that film. There was too much stop/start, this angle/that angle, do this/do that. I couldn’t just fuck, and that was frustrating for me.

The day after the shoot, Samantha asked me if I was under contract to anyone. I told her that I wasn’t and Digital offered me a contract. I wasn’t sure what to do so I talked my agent, Jim South, who was a good man with good advice. He was such a Southern gentleman. Jim was an older man with a lot of character in his face, slicked back hair, a big mustache, and talked with a soothing Southern drawl. “Well, you know, Tera,” he said to me. “You’ve been working freelance and making good money. But you might do better if you were under contract.”

He knew it was time for me to advance to the next level. I didn’t call Digital Playground back right away. Instead, I decided to shop around and see what else was out there.

The first company I went to was Wicked Pictures in Canoga Park. They are known for their big, elaborate, cinematic feature films. They were the most “Hollywood” of all the porn companies and they had big-name contract girls like Jenna Jameson, Chasey Lain, and Alexa Rae in their stable. I met with the owner, Steve Orenstein, and he wanted to sign me right away. Jenna had just left the company and they were looking for the next big thing, and that was me. But Wicked wasn’t right for me. I didn’t want to be stuck only doing big, elaborate movies. I was not into feature films. I was into so-called gonzo films. I never wanted to be an actress. People want to see Angelina Jolie or Johnny Depp act and they want to see porn people fuck. I was into fucking. If I wanted to be an actress, then Wicked would’ve been the place to be. Everyone said I was too good for gonzo, but it’s what I liked.

The next studio I checked out was Vivid Video. I liked Vivid because the two performers in the industry who I actually followed and admired were Kobe Tai and Janine Lindemulder and they were Vivid Girls. Kobe was a Taiwanese actress who I looked up to because she, like me, was Asian, and I thought if she could make it big as an Asian porn star, then maybe I could too. And Janine, well, Janine was so beautiful I could look at her for hours. I thought she was the most stunning porn actress in the industry. She has a really amazing face, and seemed like a true rebel with all her tattoos.

So, I met with Steve Hirsch, the owner of Vivid, who, by the way, is super cute. I had such a crush on him. He sat me down in front of his big desk. Twirling a phone cord nervously around his finger, he asked me, “So, what do you want to do? Do you want to be a contract girl? How many movies do you want to do? What are you willing to do?”

“Well, I don’t know. You tell me what you want me to do,” I said.

He said he’d want me to do twelve films a year, at $10,000 a film, which was a whopping $120,000, but he wanted me to do anal and DP (which means double penetration). I wasn’t willing to do either one. I left Vivid’s offices defeated. Vivid wasn’t the place for me either. I was running out of studios.

“What am I going to do?” I wondered. I didn’t fit in at Wicked. I didn’t fit in at Vivid. I didn’t want to talk to other companies. Wicked and Vivid were the big two. And Digital Playground was the underdog, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there, either.

I drank myself through New Year’s Eve alone and made a resolution for the year 2000: Take it to the next level!