Free Absolute Mayhem by Monica Mayhem Page A

to
find tops that made me feel sexy. Now I felt like more of
a woman.
    Armed with my new self-confidence, I started feature-dancing
that year, and I eventually got more gigs than
I could handle. I made a ton of money. Feature-dancing
is when a stripper gets paid per show to be the headline
act at a gentlemen's club. Usually, this girl is a porn star,
and her name and celebrity will draw more customers
to the club. A feature dancer will always put on a much
more elaborate show than a regular dancer – with big,
expensive costumes, props, games, merchandise and
other stuff . I was dancing my ass off in the strip clubs
across the country.
    In all fairness, Craven can't take full responsibility for
the problems in my movie career. It's true that I worked
condom-only after we were married, and I lost a lot of
work because of it – people don't want to shoot condoms.
We did have some kind of co-dependence thing going
on, though, which was sometimes indirectly detrimental
to me. There were a couple of times, for instance, when
Craven didn't like who I was working with – meaning,
he didn't like me fucking certain guys – so I acquiesced
and didn't do those shoots. He once insisted that I come
out to some stupid car show with him, so I had to cancel
work. Then, there was our constant fighting, which sometimes
led me to cancel shoots too.
    When I was going through all of this emotional
turbulence, I would sometimes turn to cocaine to numb
the pain. I wanted to kick the habit, though, and I went
through a stage when I would have it in my possession
for months at a time and not even touch it. I thought
I had it under control, but I was just about to enter
another period of partying.
    Marriage, clearly, wasn't quite the panacea I had
hoped for. Eventually, in December 2003, we split up
and Craven moved out. It wasn't all doom and gloom,
because it had been on the cards for ages, and a room
in my house that I'd been renting out became vacant
not too long after, and Jay Allan, my good friend and
favourite photographer, moved in. Let the good times
roll! Boy, we had some great house parties.

Chapter Five
CALIFORNICATION
    People have asked me what I think, in retrospect,
is the most important lesson I learned about
making the transition from modelling to movies. Sometimes,
I'm not sure how to answer that. The thing is, I
do love modelling and I wish I could have done more
mainstream magazine layouts, such as Maxim or FHM .
    Actually, if I hadn't done hardcore, I could have tried
out for Playboy magazine, which would have probably
launched a whole different career for me. Perhaps it
would have led me to mainstream acting and modelling,
which is what I really wanted. But Playboy likes to deploy
its famous 'girl next door' branding, and usually doesn't
use us 'girls gone bad' hardcore models. This helps to
distinguish it from its main competitor, Penthouse ,
which uses adult film stars a great deal in pictorials and
centrefolds (and which I've appeared in loads). The one
time Playboy made a notable exception was in its March
2002 issue, when they did a cover story and pictorial on
'The Women of Porn' and they had three Vivid Video
contract girls (Tera Patrick, Kira Kener and Dasha) on
the cover. Things could have been different, I guess, but
being a Pisces I'm oft en too hasty with my decisions,
and that's always been my biggest problem. In so many
ways, I am my own worst enemy.
    That's not to say that I'm not grateful for how quickly
I was able to make an impact on the porn industry. This
might have been because I was one of the few Australian
girls shooting porn in the US, a market where very few
non-American girls were being employed. There were
the Aussies Jodie Moore and Bobbi Barrington, too,
but they were only just coming into the industry
around the same time as me.
    The path I took was to base myself in Southern California
and work my ass off , whereas Jodie wanted to
be the number-one Aussie porn star so bad that she
ran for a