Scenes From My Life in Porn

In the spring of 1998, Brooke tested positive for HIV. She believed she had been infected by a male porn star named Marc Wallice during the production earlier that year of a film titled The World’s Biggest Anal Gang-Bang. Brooke starred in it with 50 men.

Like other porn stars I knew, her biography might have been lifted from the more twisted girl copy in Barely Legal. As Brooke told it, she was born on an American air base in Korea, the offspring of a U.S. soldier and a Korean mother. She was raised in Kansas City and molested at the age of 7 by ”the old man down the hall.“ According to Brooke, the old man pretended he was an invalid and needed a walker, but he was actually very strong when he got her alone in his apartment. He had lured her with ice cream. Things went downhill from there. Her mother left. Her father, once an avid porn-video collector, became a born-again Christian. Brooke grew close to an uncle who groomed her for beauty pageants. She often bragged, ”I was a runner-up in the Miss Teen Kansas City Beauty Pageant when I was 16.“ By the time she was 18, her uncle, who had functioned as her unofficial guardian, had been sent to federal prison on money-laundering charges. Brooke was working at Wal-Mart when she ran away to Florida, where she became an exotic dancer, and then to L.A., where she became a porn star.

The night I first visited her apartment, located in a sprawling stucco complex off Ventura Boulevard, Brooke hadn‘t yet seen her gangbang video. I had come over to show her the advance review copy that I’d received at LFP.

Brooke greeted me at the door in jeans and a gray T-shirt. ”Dude, that better not be a Bible,“ she said, laughing and pointing to a brown-leather appointment book I was carrying. ”My dad sent me one when he found out I was sick. I threw it in the closet.“

As she entered the kitchen to get me a drink, her cat, Chronic -- named after her favorite bud -- scampered under her feet and tripped her. Brooke fell to her knees, laughing and cursing, and discovered her pager in a gap beneath the dishwasher. ”I lost that thing a week ago.“ She picked it up and walked into the living room, engrossed as she scrolled through all the calls she‘d missed, forgetting about the drinks and the refrigerator door hanging open behind her.

Brooke’s pratfalls -- knocking over her bong, tripping on a phone cord -- were frequent and usually followed by loud fits of laughter. She had a comedian‘s gift for rueful expressions that mocked her own ditziness, like Lucy after an especially harebrained stunt. Just as quickly, she turned angry.

”Marc’s been calling me at 7 in the morning and leaving harassing messages.“ Brooke jabbed at the buttons on her answering machine. Marc Wallice‘s flat, emotionless voice came from the speaker: ”Pick up the phone, Brooke. You bitch, you whore. Pick up the phone.“

A few days earlier I had met Marc at his mother’s house, where he had been living since blowing his last dollar on a freebasing binge after news broke of his own HIV-positive status. ”I used to be a big, famous star,“ he told me. ”Now, I‘m a nobody.“ Since quitting his job bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s when he was 21, Marc had done little else but appear in porn videos. In the past 19 years, he estimated, he‘d had sex with 2,000 women. ”I’ve never dated,“ he said. ”I‘ve never had to be desirable. How do I just walk up to a girl and say hi?“ Then he had played me phone messages from Brooke: ”You fucker. You a don’t have any friends.“

She had called around 7 in the morning too. Both of them were up at that hour -- Brooke taking her meds, Marc at the end of a bumpy coke ride. In happier times, they had been ”fuck buddies“ off the set and had binged on drugs together. Now, in their respective messages, each sounded scared and desperate, like someone who really needed to talk to an old friend.

”Dude, he is so guilty,“ Brooke said to me, gazing at the picture of herself on the cover of World‘s Biggest Anal Gang-Bang.

She claimed she was unable to operate her VCR, and asked me to do it. It was a matter of pressing the ON button and sliding the tape in. I sat next to her on the couch. ”I can’t watch this without smoking a bowl,“ she said. She loaded her bong, then forgot to light it as the video began.

On the screen, Brooke appeared in a dressing room having her makeup done. She wore a gold silk suit jacket and thong panties.

”Oh, God!“ Brooke shouted. ”Look how wrinkled my suit is!“

On the screen, the makeup girl asked her in a stagy voice, ”Do you think you‘re going to be all right?“