Shane's World made me a dick, or: Goin' back to Calli

As America’s Beloved Porn Journalist, I am used to being treated a certain way. When Adam & Eve sends me marital aids to review, they also make sure to send the woman on the package. When Hustler sends a DVD, they use scented tape on the cardboard box. Entice.tv delivers content in such vivid clarity that it often makes me weep like a little girl. I won’t tell you what Digital Playground does; I just won’t.

Over the past few weeks I have been receiving news of a super-secret Shane’s World tenth anniversary party, sponsored by PPPcard and industry-leading trade publication XBiz. “Invitations to 200 VIPs will be sent in the mail,” the notifications said.

“Mail,” I thought. “How quaint!” I immediately went down the hall to dust off my paper-based mail receptacle device, shooing away a couple of historical interpreters from Colonial Williamsburg in snoods bent on explaining it to school groups.

“Out of my way, liberal arts majors,” I said, “I’m getting an invitation to the Shane’s World party. Why else would they send me all these notices about it if they weren’t going to invite me?”

The party was yesterday and by Wednesday of last week I hadn’t received my invitation, which was a gold-leaf ticket supposedly delivered by an actual little person. I e-mailed Shane’s World and asked, “So do you want me to publicize an event you’re not inviting me to?”

“A lot of the invites were lost or stolen,” I was told, “but you’re on the list.”

I have since gotten over my wariness of being told I was “on the list” following the tragic Jill Kelly party at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas in 2003 in which I, the in pupa America’s Beloved Porn Journalist, was turned away by a bouncer who had never heard of the word “list”.

“When God was passing out lists, I thought he said ‘fists’ and that’s what you’re gonna get if you don’t turn around,” he said, in the movie version of my life.

So I arrived at the Beverly Hilton last night fully expecting to indeed be on the list, and it turns out I indeed was. But there were two lists. More on that later.

In many trendy parts of the world, shuttle van service is a mark of sophistication. It says that your shindig is so exclusive that guests will need to park elsewhere and be shuttled to it. This happens in Vail, Park City, Beverly Hills, Aspen, and Las Vegas. Sure it also happened at Auschwitz, but if Skeeter Kerkove can call himself the King of Sodom then I am reasonably sure that a sense of history is not porn’s strong suit.

Because the party was at a super-secret location, guests were to park at the Beverly Hilton and be ferried to the address after being checked in by Shane’s World functionaries. In the check-in line, I and another press person were told that

a. There was a V.I.P. list and a press list.
b. We were on the press list.
c. The press would be shuttled to the location (BabyFace‘s old house, now owned, it was rumored, by a Korean millionaire named Wayne Kow), allowed to take pictures on the red carpet outside of the party, be shuttled back to the Hilton to put our cameras away, outfitted with orange wristbands (the V.I.P.s got green ones), and then be shuttled back to the party to attend it.

I have a fair-to-middling sense of my own limitations, and am not ashamed to say that writing about porn is almost useless without pictures. It then becomes erotica, and one might as well put a gun to one’s head and settle in for thirty years of watching VH-1.

The other photographer in line, whose name I didn’t get but who was probably a photoset provider, said something very wise:

“I can get red carpet shots from anybody, and I know that if I return here after the red carpet there’s no chance I’ll get a shuttle back. I’m going to leave my camera in the car and just go to the party.”

He was right. I met several people who went the red carpet route and then had to wait with their 2nd-class orange bracelets with the throngs who showed up later, getting bumped from vans. So I left my camera in my car, too, after seriously considering going home. I hadn’t been told about this second list, and thought it was foolish for a porn party to have a no camera rule, as if not allowing cameras lends legitimacy to the term “porn party”.

So I piled into the van behind Jennifer James, who was wearing black slacks and a trendy backless number. Too bad I couldn’t get a picture. “We’d better not be going to Beverly Hills adjacent,” I grumbled.

We travelled through the twilight past well-kept jogging trophy wives and vast, spotless unused lawns. As we ascended the porn party street (I eventually turned on the GPS of my phone to get the address), I saw that dozens of cars were already parked around the house.

I saw poor, doomed photographer Rachel Worth in the red carpet ghetto. We shook hands/ half-hugged awkwardly. We were in different worlds now.

I descended a curving set of flagstone stairs to the pool. Tables were set up around it. There was an open bar.

I called this a Stage 3 Variant 2 Open Bar. That meant that it was a bar that remained open all night (Variant 2) and was not limited to beer and wine (Stage 1) or well drinks (Stage 2) but was sponsored by a particular company (Redrum-Voodoo Spiced Rum) so didn’t have a full range of alcohols (which, if it had, would have made it a Stage 4).

I felt awkward because I’d never had Voodoo Rum before. “It’s like Captain Morgan Spiced Rum but better,” the rep said. Looking around at the palatial house and grounds, I was somewhat aware of a class difference, especially since I was wearing a shameful orange bracelet. Might he have used that comparison because he thought, because of my bracelet, that I could only afford Captain Morgan? Is Voodoo the Cristal of spiced rums? Was it like showing me a Bentley and saying, “It’s like your Honda, but better” because my frame of reference was so white trash?

Then I remembered something: The rich pay for nothing.

“I’ll have one of them Voodoos,” I said.

The bartenders were pleasant.

“Have you been here before?” I asked.

“A few times,” one said.

“Who owns this place?” I asked.

I received four different answers to that question over the course of the evening. The bartender replied, “The blonde guy with long hair. I don’t think he even lives here.”

“I should buy one of these houses and rent it out for parties,” I said, biting off the end of my cigar. “It would probably hold more people than my apartment in Silverlake.”

I walked upstairs to where a stage was set up. There were banners proclaiming Shane’s World’s new contract girl. Alas, she was in a V.I.P. area to which people like me were denied access, and I couldn’t take pictures anyway.

You know who I really liked, though? Calli Cox. That corn-fed former teacher was a cutie. She left Shane’s World and the business a few years ago and, from what I’ve heard, never looked back. She would have let me bring my camera.

Calli Cox was great. I hope she’s doing well.

Former porn journalist Steve Ochs took these pictures of Calli Cox at the Venetian a couple of AVN Expos ago. That Calli Cox sure was accessible to potential consumers and the media.

I encountered strolling magician David Neubauer who did some things with my business card that made me think I was losing my mind. He told me about a recent ceremony at the Magic Castle in which a deceased magician’s wand was broken in a ceremony.

“That says the magic was in the person, not the wand,” he said. “When the person is gone, there is no need for the wand.”

What gets broken when a porn performer dies? Best not to think about it.

“I bet you can’t conjure me up a goddamn camera,” I said.

Like Jaws off Amity Island, I staked a claim at a corner table and sat there for a few hours.

I saw Adrianna Nicole, muse for my directorial debut in Barbed Wire Kiss. No footage survives of my groundbreaking motivational techniques. “I’m waiting for Spiegler,” she said.

“We are all waiting for Spiegler,” I noted.

Mark Spiegler runs Spiegler Girls, a talent agency full of the juicier women in the porn industry, including Katja Kassin, who told me of the term Landmädl. That word is consistently a high-ranking search term on my site, in addition to, for some reason, pegging.

“Do people ask you about ‘Landmädl‘ a lot?” I asked her.

“No, but they do ask how I like it up the ass,” she said.

I’d like to have taken a picture of Adrianna Nicole and Katja Kassin but, you know: No camera.

Despite the beautiful evening, the free drinks, a nice table by the pool, the reassuring 80’s music, and an agreeable cloud of cigar smoke around me, I was irritated. What good were bons mots like those of Kassin if I couldn’t get a trademark shot of her slapping her own ass or giving the finger to the camera?

Hillary Scott came by. She is the new Britney Rears and she is also the lead in Eli Cross’ new movie, Corruption.

“Eli said that there were auditions for this movie and that you cried on cue,” I said. “I didn’t believe him. The only auditions I’ve heard of in porn are on the sales manager’s IKEA couch.”

“No,” she said. “I really did it. In fact, I had to cry four times. I can do it now if you want me to.”

“No, Hillary,” I said. “Tonight is about my tears, not yours.”

Feeling lowdown, I had an idea, and it repulsed me. I reasoned that Hillary, being a very dirty girl from Chicago, might let me get away with a certain amount of debasement.

“I feel like a dick,” I said. “But would you allow me to take a picture of you with my camera phone?”

People standing around car wrecks or porn events with camera phones make me want to throw up in my mouth. Now I had become one of them. Shane’s World had seen to that.

“Sure!” she said. The first one is always free.

Jordan James, an Albany-born, London-educated, Vegas-corrupted blonde whom Sindy Lange introduced to the business (and who resembles Lange a little), came by. She’s been in Los Angeles two weeks.

“I do Girl/Girl and Boy/Girl but no anal,” she said.

I felt dirty. She and I were about to do my version of triple vag/double anal bareback with machine guns and a water buffalo.

“Can I take your picture with my camera phone?” I asked, glad there was no mirror around for fear of seeing what I’d become.

“Sure!” she said. I know she was being brave.

All Media Play president and Britney Rears Svengali Jeff Mullen stopped by. He looked at the house.

“Doing work for hire doesn’t get you a house like this,” he said, and then outlined a three-year plan to riches and stardom that should be an infomercial starring Treat Williams as Jeff. It was not lost on me that the director of Barely Legal Schoolgirls would covet the BabyFace money.

I passed a little field of swag bags. A staffer was just about to give me one and then he saw my wristband like the mark of Cain.

“Can I get one of those?” I asked.

“You need the gold ticket,” he said, to his credit apologetically.

“There are more bags here than people at the party,” I said. Did I really want a bag? I wasn’t sure anymore. Hollywood was built on swag bags and stolen water. If I didn’t get a swag bag I might as well move back to Bogue Chitto.

By the bathrooms I bumped into Kelly, a Wicked woman. Her dress was scandalous and I became ashamed. I could also feel my awful press bracelet chafing. I felt like I met the popular girl at the dance but she rejected me due to the scar tissue all over my body. It was the same with Hustler’s Amy. What is it with porn executive women and their provocative attire? Elaine Taint never dressed that way.

Notice that it was only the women who give it away professionally whom I asked to debase with my camera phone.

This is how the evening might have looked if I’d had my camera.

There was a crush of people at the shuttle stop, reminiscent of the fall of Havana in Godfather II. I spied lonelyhearts Acme Andersson and Holly Randall.