Sinner Takes All

CHAPTER 22 Mr. Kookaburra and Mrs. Barramundi

As my manager, Evan quickly figured out that there was a huge porn market internationally. He used his knowledge of touring the world with his band, which made more money overseas than Stateside, and set out to make Teravision and Tera Patrick global brands. Before we knew it, I was appearing at porn conventions and doing my feature dancing show all over the world.

One of the biggest conventions I ever did was the Sexpo in Sydney, Australia, in 2004. I appeared at the convention for a whopping fee of $20,000 (and first-class airfare and accommodations, no less!), but where we really made bank was when they booked me to dance at a venue that normally hosts big rock bands and seats eight thousand people. I had eight nearly sold-out shows in four days there.

Before we knew how big the venue really was and that it was sold out, Evan gave me this pep talk: “Don’t worry if there’s only two hundred people there. You’re new to the market. Don’t worry.” And then we show up and there were thousands of people there. Once again there wasn’t a stripper pole on the stage because it wasn’t a strip club, so we decided to improvise a bit and use a chair in the center of the stage as a prop. But that didn’t help much. The huge stage made our tiny chair look like Stonehenge from the movie This Is Spinal Tap. We were cracking up over that. Evan decided to just treat it like a rock show and use the video monitors at the venue to show my performance. That did the trick.

The large crowd didn’t freak me out at all. In fact, it’s easier to perform for a larger audience than a more intimate one. It’s easy to be great when you have thousands of people screaming for you. The intensity of the crowd really got me going, and I killed!

The line for photos and merchandise afterward was the longest line I’d ever had in my entire career. It was so long and so slow that Evan got a megaphone and was walking down the line telling people, “Due to the large volume of fans, we are selling one thing. It’s a package with a DVD, a Polaroid with Tera, and an autographed eight-by-ten photo for fifty Australian dollars.” He was embarrassing me. He’d stand up on the table and shout out: “Cash only!”

We sold out of everything, making more than $40,000 in merchandise sales! We had Tera Patrick T-shirts that looked like the Harley-Davidson logo, but they said Tera Patrick and Teravision on them, along with trucker hats, posters, and glossy photos. We were taking in so much cash that Evan had to send a runner out to buy him a fanny pack to put the money in. People joke about “suitcase pimps”—you know, the boyfriend of the porn star who rolls her suitcase around for her, collects (and spends) her dough, and pimps her out. Evan was my fanny-pack pimp on this trip!

We made so much money from this trip that we decided to spend the cash on a lavish vacation in the most exclusive resort in the area: the Hayman Island Resort in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s what they like to call a “six-star” resort on a private, remote island. We had to take two flights and two ferries to get there. It’s very exclusive and very expensive, but we were busting at the seams with cash and needed a getaway. It was so upscale that when we’d come out of a secluded lagoon after skinny-dipping, there was a butler greeting us with, “Would you care for a towel, madame? How about water, sir?” We didn’t think the Seinfelds fit in here, so we started addressing each other as Mr. Kookaburra and Mrs. Barramundi. Kookaburra is a bird native to Australia that is known as “the laughing bird” for its loud call, and a barramundi is a native fish. Throughout the entire trip it was, “Good morning Mr. Kookaburra. Would you care for a stroll on the beach today?” “Why yes, Mrs. Barramundi, that sounds like a delightful idea.”

We were having the time of our lives in the most beautiful place we’d ever been, so we decided to get married again. Evan said on our first wedding night that he wanted to marry me over and over again, and he made good on that just eight months later. And like Vegas, Evan handled all of the arrangements. He loved whipping up romantic surprises for me. He went out and got me a diamond wedding band, as I still didn’t have a band from our first wedding. A vintage white Rolls-Royce drove us to the ceremony spot on a grassy area elevated above the beach with a stunning view of the water.

I’ll never forget Evan’s vows to me. He said, “I have no doubt that we will love each other forever. Our life is moving very fast externally, but I just want you to know that, internally, I’m standing still with you, holding hands.”