Tanner Mayes Won’t Fight Nature

portions of this interview reprinted from Hustler’s All Sex Issue #1

Tanner Mayes, the smart, flighty, adorable porn ingenue, is so cute that you sometimes marvel at what she could get away with if she concentrates hard enough. Arson? Murder? My attempts to nail (ahem) Mayes down for this Hustler story are great examples of why certain 20-year-old women can be forgiven anything.

Mayes and her roommate arrive an hour late for our first interview. It’s a good idea we’re not alone; she’s skittish and nervous enough already, her little chest rising and hitching. I’ve told her the interview is for Hustler’s All Sex issue, which is a mistake, because many of her answers are followed by “Was that sexy?”

She doesn’t realize that, with the way she looks – no bra, thin dress, high heels, skinny legs and arms going off at odd angles – everything she does is sexy. Or maybe she’s known that all along.

The roommate is a genial but hulking guy, a classmate from her home town of Adrian, Michigan (pop 20,000). But he storms off when Mayes mentions a gangbang she had when he wasn’t home.

“We used to date,” she says.

A week later, for our photo shoot, Mayes is 90 minutes late (“I had to touch up my nails,” she says, heedless of the fact that she would have been just as enticing had she arrived missing her top row of teeth, a leg, and perhaps a nipple).

Today she is accompanied by a 53-year-old man, the pornographer Nick Sharp. Mayes obviously makes him feel like the luckiest guy in the world. He says, “I love her like a butterfly on a really long leash.”

The roommate and former boyfriend had, in the week since our first meeting, packed up and left. Sharp said, “A young guy can’t handle a girl like that. He’d go crazy.”

It makes sense to me. If I were to have met Mayes when I was 20, I would have been nervous and agitated all the time.

Sharp sagely quotes a Dr. Hook song from before Mayes was born: “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, you watch your friends.”

Now that I am older, I have a better plan: Ride the lightning, jump off invigorated, take a little nap.

What makes Mayes catnip to older men and kryptonite to younger ones? Consider some of the productions that pepper her two-year porn career, many of which emphasize her deceptively virginal nature, like “Jailbait 6,” “Teens in Tight Jeans 4,” and any number of “Barely Legal” derivatives like “I’m Young, Dumb, and Thirsty for Cum,” “Pure 18 #9,” and, now that you mention it, Hustler’s “Barely Legal 90” and “Barely Legal 98.”

Brandon Iron, who directed (and fucked) Mayes in the ninth and eleventh editions of his “She Is Half My Age,” says that she respects her elders.

“I don’t bullshit her. She doesn’t bullshit me,” Iron says. “We just honestly enjoy perving each other out and each time we shot, she was willing to go a step further. She really enjoys being as dirty as you want her to be.”

Director Will Ryder is also a Mayes fan. He directed her in “Not the Bradys XXX: Pussy Power.” “She has got it,” Ryder says. “Out of a thousand girls who show up here every year, there is just something about Tanner Mayes that turns me inside out.”

Sharp agrees. He shot Mayes for his series “Porn Justice.” “She lights up the room,” he says. “She connects with you in a way that the other teenyboppers don’t.”

“I love Tanner Mayes,” Iron adds. “There is a way she looks at you that makes you want to take care of her and fuck the shit out of her at the same time.”

The love and tolerance of most of her elders notwithstanding, Mayes had a celebrated “meltdown” on the set of a bukkake movie that was filmed and released, in straightforward porn fashion, as “Tanner Mayes Meltdown.”

She is upset that people she trusted released footage of her in such a vulnerable (read: drunk) state, but acknowledges that she is more famous today because of it.

“I’m running down the hall, naked and covered with come,” she says. “And I keep telling them to turn the camera off. I wish they would have. ”

I tell Mayes that my impression of porn is that sometimes people are attracted to the same person for different reasons. And Mayes attracts attention.

“Most of the attention buzzing around ‘Tanner Mayes’ has been negative,” she says, referring to the chatboard flame war that only served to make the bukkake producers money. “And that is not addictive at all. It’s frustrating, it hurts your feelings.”

Mayes says the incident killed her spirit for awhile, but she is eager to let people know that she is not only reliable but also “horny as fuck.”

“I’ve been this way as long as I can remember,” Mayes says. “I used a Ken doll’s head to rub against my clit to get myself off. Is that sexy?”

Not too long ago, when she was in high school, Mayes says she was the shy one. That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t fuck you but, in that group of eight “wild girls” (as she describes them) that she ran with, Mayes was the most demure.

“I wasn’t out there,” she says. “But I got there.”

It makes you wonder what’s in the water in Adrian, if this petite and quivering thing, whose body smells like snowflakes and melon body spray, was the shy one among those vixens.

“We used to do bad things together,” Mayes says. “Hanging around with older men…I didn’t dress slutty. That’s probably what made older guys go crazy. I lead them on to think I had a lot of respect for myself.”

“Er. And did you?”

“Enough to have a good time.”

“So if you’re the shy one of those girls,” I ask, thinking about the Best “Barely Legal” ever, “why aren’t they all in porn, too?”

“Well, that’s Adrian,” she says. “They’re either pregnant or married or in jail. Oh. A couple went to college.”

To look at Mayes is to go just a little crazy. While there is probably a wardrobe of burlap and steel she could wear to distract one from her essential come-hitherness, Mayes is one of those people who accepts the fact that people want to fuck her.

“I noticed from a young age that men looked at me,” she says. “It was something that they did that I got used to, and eventually I was tempted to flirt back.”

“Back in Adrian,” we ask, “what do you think it was about you that older men wanted?”

“It was more like there’s something about older guys that I want,” she says.

“And what do you want?”

“It’s hard to say,” she says.

And that might be one of the keys to Mayes’ appeal. She looks both virginal and utterly ready to go. She is both very shy (“I’m even shy on porn sets,” she says) and a wildcat when the camera is rolling. We continued our interview at a secluded but public L.A. park, where neither of us noticed the crowd that gathered when Mayes let the straps down on her summer dress.

“Hi,” Mayes said to the little crowd, topless.

After high school Mayes moved to Florida, where she worked 80-hour weeks at Subway (“sometimes there was bad meat,” she says. At that point in our interview everything sounds dirty), as a hostess at an upscale bar and barbershop and, later, as a receptionist at a law firm.

“I can type 110 words per minute,” Mayes says. “I know Word and Excel. But I wore clothes that were … flattering….to my interview and I got the job over the other ladies with more experience. I was waiting for a ride and this guy said, ‘So you really want the job?’ It turns out he was the boss.

“And?”

“…and I ended up fucking the boss,” she says.

“Did you consider yourself promiscuous?” I ask.

“After Michigan,” she says, “I was abstinent. For a while. It wasn’t like I was ashamed of my past, but I didn’t think I should be promiscuous.”

“Why?”

“I just thought it was something that wasn’t good to be.”

But Mayes realizes that, much as it is in her nature to be shy, it is just as natural to indulge her carnal side. She answered a Florida modeling ad and – though she is not surprised by this now – was shocked to be asked if she’d ever done adult work.

“No,” she said at the time, “You mean people having sex?”

Mayes didn’t follow porn when she was younger. She couldn’t remember the names of any porn movies or porn personalities.

“It wasn’t what I was into,” she says. “I masturbated a lot to movies, though. There’s a great scene in ‘Hellraiser 2’ – when the woman comes back to life with no skin – that was really sexy to me. Do you think that’s creepy?”

“Well yeah,” I say, “but in the best possible way.”

Like a lot of porn performers, Mayes learned a lot about sex on the set.

“I just found out the pee hole was in the vagina,” she says. “That freaked me out.”

And she has extended her enquiries to the back door as well.

“I don’t do anal yet,” she said. “But I’m working at home. I want to get that stretched out this summer.”

“Good for you.”

Mayes told us about a rare day off.

“Yesterday I was watching porn all day (now that she’s a bona fide member of the adult industry, she can probably declare her porn consumption on her taxes),” she says. “And toward the end of it I was like, ‘I have never been gangbanged.’ So I texted a few people I knew and said, ‘Come on over.'”

“I hope they were respectful of the occasion,” I say, making sure she had my phone number.

“Yeah,” she says. “Everyone had condoms. There were three guys. No big deal. The worst it got was when one guy pulled out his camera phone. I was like, ‘No way. This is between us.'”

I ask if the folks back home would be surprised to see her in Hustler.

“Nope,” Mayes says. “They’d say, ‘Who didn’t see that coming?'”

Then she answered the question herself.

“Well, I didn’t. I wanted that slutty part of my life behind me. But it keeps coming back. I realize it’s in my nature.”

We asked if she saw herself, twice her current age, giving handjobs on camera, a MILF.

“Oh hell no,” she says. “Whatever I’m doing, I’m not doing this.”

It’s true that I can’t see Mayes making the transition from this coltish tartlet to thicker-hipped, blowsy and frank trophy wife with glorious fleshy bolt-ons and a predatory streak. But you never know.

You can’t fight your nature, Tanner.

I interview Jesse Jane in Hustler’s next All-Sex issue, to be released in September

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: The Devil in Tanner Mayes gallery
See also: Order Hustler’s All Sex issue #1