Sinner Takes All: A Memoir of Love & Porn Read online

  When it came to Sebastian and his wife, Maria, though, things steamed up big-time. Sebastian and I hit it off immediately over our shared love of smoking weed. He caught me trying to roll a joint one day and laughed at my poor form. "Here, let me show you how to do that right," he said, as he took the rolling paper and some weed and rolled the perfect joint. I was a huge '80s rock fan when I was a teen and drooled over Sebastian's photos in rock magazines, so I felt like a schoolgirl every time we hung out. Sebastian was so funny about smoking. He didn't care if the VH1 cameras caught him; he only cared if Ted Nugent caught him. I think he looked up to Ted like a father figure because his own dad had passed away. He would get really paranoid of Ted finding out. (I guess now he'll know. Sorry, Sebastian.)

  Sebastian's wife, Maria, was super hot, and there was a lot of innocent sexual energy between Evan and me and Sebastian and Maria. We decided to do something about all that energy. Not a foursome, though we came close! Instead, we decided to do a very sexy photo shoot of Maria and me for our husbands. It was our little treat for them. One of Evan's many talents is his photographic work, and over the years, he's photographed me many times. So he grabbed his photo equipment, even found someone to be his photo assistant, and set up a sizzling shoot in the room we were staying in. We had the best room in the house. It was a round room with hand-painted dragons on the walls, a round bed in the center, and a badass custom motorcycle for adornment . . . perfect for a photo shoot.

  Sebastian was hilarious during the shoot. He kept making these noises because he was so excited to see his wife half-naked with another woman. But at the same time, he couldn't stop directing her and it seemed to make her nervous. I'll never forget when Maria laid me back on the bike and we were face to face. If it weren't for Sebastian and his big mouth interrupting the moment, who knows what would've happened. Well, I know what would've happened.

  It wasn't all sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll during SuperGroup, though. Evan and I had our romantic moments too. One night, Evan told me to be ready in twenty minutes because the show's limo would be taking us somewhere. We really abused our limo privileges during that shoot. I assumed we were going to dinner or a strip club, as per usual. But instead, we pulled up to a wedding chapel, and the second I saw the chapel sign, I started to cry.

  "Again?" I said to Evan, being that this would be the third time we renewed our vows.

  "Yep, again," he said.

  Our theory on getting married over and over again was this: You don't go to the gym just once and stay fit for life. So, why commit yourself to each other just once in your life? Renewing our vows and recommitting ourselves to each other is like maintenance for our marriage. It's constant work and needs constant reaffirmations. So, we said our "I Do's" in front of an Elvis Presley impersonator and the VH1 crew, and I felt giddy like a new bride all over again. We hopped back in the limo, closed the partition, and made love like newlyweds once again.

  ONE DAY IN 2006, we got a call from the producers of Will Ferrell's movie Blades of Glory. His character in the movie is this washed-up ice-skating pro who is trying to make a comeback and part of his backstory was that he did a porn movie that won an AVN award called The Iceman Cometh. The producers were looking for two porn stars to pose with Will for a fake DVD box cover of the movie. When they called me I was thrilled and said yes immediately. They asked me who I thought should be the second girl for the shoot and I chose Stormy Daniels because we were friends and had worked together before.

  Apparently, the reason they set up the shoot on a Sunday was because the producer Patrick Esposito said that people at Paramount might be uptight about having porn chicks on the lot. It was a pretty intense set. Porn shoots are so low-key, but this was very high-energy and very Hollywood. You'd hear on the walkie-talkies, "Tera and Stormy are coming out of their dressing room." "Tera and Stormy are walking." "Go for Patrick." It was so funny.

  All of a sudden, we look around and there are hundreds of people looking on. Patrick told us it was 450 people to be exact, which was just about everyone who worked for or at Paramount. So much for keeping it quiet on a Sunday afternoon! The director said he'd never seen anything like this before. It was flattering.

  The shoot was fun. We posed in fur bikinis with huge furry boots, looking like sexy cavewomen. When I first met Will, I was shocked at how much makeup he had on. I thought porn makeup was heavy, but it was nothing compared to movie makeup. We said our hellos to Will, and he got right down to business: "Awesome, ladies. Let's get to work." Stormy and I were on either side of Will, straddling his legs as he stood there, legs spread wide, making funny faces and cracking us up. He really has a way of contorting his face to fit the goofy character perfectly. I've never had someone make me laugh out loud without uttering a word like Will Ferrell did. He was hilarious.

  From the Blades of Glory shoot

  "Grab Tera's hair," the director told Will, who, by the way, could not have been nicer.

  Will takes a handful of my hair and picks it up like he's picking up a butterfly or something.

  I told him, "No, grab it harder." I love getting my hair pulled, so I thought I'd have some fun with Will.

  "I don't want to hurt you," he said.

  "No, really, it's OK," I insisted.

  So he grabs my hair again and it's still gentle as hell. So, Stormy gets in on the action: "Grab it, Will! Grab it harder!"

  Will still wouldn't grab it harder. He kept saying, "No, no, I don't want to." Everyone's yelling, "Grab it harder!" He must have thought we were crazy. He was such a gentleman and very kind. But damn him for not yanking on my hair!

  One of my favorite opportunities in 2006, though, was being on the animated show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which airs on The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. I always wanted someone to make me into a cartoon. I mean, who doesn't want to be animated, right? The funniest part is that in the show they had me in a tiny blue bikini on all fours, eating a corn dog!

  When I got to the voice-over studio to tape my lines, there was a hot dog sitting on the console next to my headphones. Hmmm. That's odd, I thought. Maybe someone left their lunch in the booth. "Oh, that hot dog is for you," the director said.

  "Huh?"

  "Yeah, the scene calls for you to be eating a corn dog while you're talking, but we could't find one so we got you this hot dog to eat while you're reading your lines," he said.

  Hmmm. Was this just a cheap ruse to get a porn star to eat a hot dog in front of them? Nope. The script really did have me chowing down. "OK. I don't eat hot dogs, but I'll give it a whirl," I said. So, down the hatch it went. I never actually watched the episode I was on until three years later, and I have to say, I cracked up over how they had me on all fours throughout the entire thing. It was hilarious. And of course, the video of me eating the hot dog made it onto YouTube and the DVD release. The episode, titled "Grim Reaper Gutters," aired on November 19, 2006.

  I gained so much more recognition from all of these endeavors, which felt fantastic. But more important, I made my family proud. Sure, they had accepted my life in porn, but it wasn't exactly something they could brag about to their friends and coworkers. With the work I did in 2006 and beyond, they finally had some PG-13 things they could hold up and say, "This is my daughter!" Every time I'd get on a VH1 show or E! or in the news, they'd call up all their friends and say, "There's Linda!" Fans have asked me in the past if my family watched my work. And I just have to laugh. Yeah, right. We have Tera Patrick movie nights and eat popcorn while watching my porn. But now there are actually shows we can watch together and be proud of. It felt great that my family could finally participate in my success.

  Of course, all this helped my mental state. My "crazy Tera" episodes were few and far between. I was feeling great about my career, happy, and really satisfied and rewarded for working so hard all these years. I finally got to a place where I didn't have to work as much and I could pick and choose what projects I wanted to do. And we did it our way. Evan was kicking ass as my man
ager, and I was happy not just for myself, but also for him. It was hard for naysayers to put him down at this point. Just three years before, I was suicidal and now we were able to have the last laugh. I'd been dragged through so much shit, and we came out smelling like roses.

  Being happy in my marriage and career also helped me with my family affairs. But what especially helped was being close with Evan's family. I didn't grow up with that close-knit family unit and I've had an inconsistent relationship with my father over the years; a long-distance one with my sister Debby; and no relationship with my mother until 2009. So when the Seinfelds welcomed me with open arms, I accepted their love and let them be my family. Evan was lucky to have a mother and father still together after all these years.

  I think they accepted me because they saw how in love Evan and I were and how much I cared about Evan's son, Sammy. And they respected me as a successful businesswoman. Evan says that he grew closer to his parents after we got together because it showed them that he finally was settling down in life. I learned how to be the perfect wife from Lois, Evan's mom. That was always one of my goals in life, to be a housewife in addition to a porn star. And Lois and Ira were very instrumental in bringing that side of my personality out and helping me achieve that personal goal. I learned how to cook Jewish foods, such as latkes. My favorite vacations were visiting them in Boynton Beach. I'd play shuffleboard and shop at the 99-cent store with Lois and visit museums with Ira. And they would always treat me as if I was just a normal housewife. It settled my heart.

  The culmination of the year for us would be what the Seinfelds call "Fake Hanukkah." Evan's parents are "snow birds." They stay in Florida in the winter and fly up to visit the rest of the family in New York in the warmer months. So instead of celebrating Hanukkah in the dead of the December winter, we'd celebrate it on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, because it wasn't as cold and it was the latest the whole family would stay in New York. The entire family would be there, and we'd cook a huge Jewish meal with latkes, chopped liver, tongue, and corned beef. Everyone would be shouting at one another in good fun. We even had a dreidel, and would light the menorah together. It was your typical big, loud, Jewish family dinner, and I just loved it. Even though it wasn't at the year's end, it completed the year for us.

  I also love being a stepmother to Sammy, who was just six years old when I met Evan. He's fifteen years old now. Sammy is such a good kid, and I took to him immediately. He called me "Twear" when we first met, and he still says that today. Between 2003 and 2008, Evan and I were bicoastal, commuting back and forth from Los Angeles to New York to see Sammy on weekends. (Evan had partial custody--Elena had him weekdays and Evan had him weekends.) It was quite the commute for a weekend because not only did we fly for six hours cross-country, we also had to fight rush-hour Friday traffic in New York to get from our place to where Sammy lived with his mother. But I couldn't wait to do it each time.

  I'd make him breakfast every morning and we'd watch SpongeBob SquarePants marathons when he was a kid and play video games together as he got older. I'd take him shopping at the mall, teach him how to spike his hair with gel, and just hang out and chill. When I appeared in the game Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood and became a special producer for Saints Row 2, I scored big points with him because it was something he could show off to his friends. He even got to test drive Saints Row 2 a few months before it was released and was thrilled about that. Once he got older, we'd fly him to L.A. for weekends, and he once told us that he doesn't tell his friends about his jet-set lifestyle because they wouldn't believe him.

  TERA'S TAT-ALOGUE:

  I have five tattoos: a sacred heart on my ankle, an arm sleeve, a star on the inside of each wrist, and Hello Kitty on the back of my neck.

  I got my first tattoo on my eighteenth birthday, in Idaho. I only had $65 to spend, so I got a small fuchsia rose on my right ankle. By 2002, it had started to fade, so I had it covered up with a sacred heart with a crown on top that says "Evan's Princess." I got that while I was on tour with Biohazard with Evan by a world-famous tattooist named Tin Tin at his shop in Paris. We'd only been together for two months at the time.

  Getting my ankle done in Paris

  Next to my inked version

  My next tattoos were the pink and black stars I have on the inside of my wrists. I got those done by Chris Nunez in 2006 on the TV show Miami Ink, and Evan got "Tera" tattooed on the side of his neck under his son's name. (Evan also has "Linda" on his wrist, and a portrait of me with devil's horns on his rib cage, by Mr. Cartoon.)

  Next up was the dragon on my right arm by Hori Taku San at Mario Barth's Starlight Tattoo shop in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Chuck Zito and I were the first two people to get tattooed there. The outline was done with a modern tattoo gun, but the shading was done using the old-fashioned Tebori tapping style. Then Robert Atkinson finished up the arm with the cherry blossoms, water, and isobars.

  My Hello Kitty tattoo

  And lastly, Hello Kitty is my favorite thing in the world so I just had to get a Hello Kitty tattoo. In December 2008, I got her dressed like a burlesque dancer on the back of my neck.

  CHAPTER 27

  SO, You Want to Be a REAL Porn Star?

  When Evan and I sat down in 2003 and decided I would reenter the porn world with Teravision, I told him that I didn't want to shoot movies forever, especially not well into my thirties. Our plan was simple: Form our company, make lucrative deals, and film maybe ten movies for the next few years and then release them slowly in the coming years so there would be a steady stream of product, but I wouldn't have to shoot month after month or year after year. So when I had enough movies in the can and the mainstream media was accepting me, I figured that was the time to stop filming and focus on other things, like my lingerie line, Mistress Couture, which my sister and I launched in 2007, or the burlesque show in Las Vegas that I am launching in 2010. Or, other projects included the Fit 4 Sex exercise videos, the Playboy TV show School for Sex, the Rock Star/Porn Star radio show we did for Sirius Radio, and working on Teravision and my website. I didn't want to turn my back on the adult industry. I love the industry and I will forever be a part of it. I just didn't want to be fucking on camera for a living for the rest of my life.

  The problem was that while I might have wanted to stop filming, Evan wasn't ready to stop. He had just begun. And he was enjoying being Spyder Jonez. He had quite a fan base and was really great on camera. So, one night in 2005 Evan sat me down and said, "Listen, you can stop doing porn. But I don't want to."

  "Wait, what?" I reverted back to the jealous, insecure Tera who would scratch him up at the mere thought of him being with another girl. But I'm just like any other hot-blooded female in the world: I get jealous too. I have insecurities. I might be a porn star and head of a company, but I was also just a girl in love with a boy. And it was not easy at first to accept Evan's desires to branch out in 2005.

  "Hey, you know we're doing Test Drive soon and I'd like to shoot a scene in it," Evan said.

  "Wait, what?!" I still couldn't believe it. "You want to fuck another girl? You want to do a scene without me?"

  "Well, think of this way: If I do the scene, you don't have to pay a talent fee to another guy and it saves us money," he said with a smirk.

  This is when my doubts about Evan's intentions started creeping into my brain, and I started to fear that our marriage was taking a turn I didn't expect and certainly didn't want.

  The only thoughts running through my mind were that he was bored of fucking me, he wanted to fuck other girls, he would find someone he liked better and leave me for her. It was irrational. Being a porn star myself I should know that it's just business. Porn stars are not like civilians. We can separate our work from our personal life. I should know, I fucked many men on-screen and it didn't affect my marriage at all. I knew this. But I was really worried nonetheless. I worked my whole life to get to this place where I had my prince charming, and I didn'
t want to lose that. That scared the hell out of me. I was afraid he'd find a saner girl and finally say to me, "You know what, Tera? You're crazy. I can't take it." I just kept thinking, "But why?" No matter what reason he gave me, I would say, "But why?" There was no right answer.

  We were both working so hard when it came to Teravision. He had put his music career on hold to be my CEO. And he wasn't done living out his porn fantasies on-screen. He wanted to get his freak on, and that had nothing to do with his feelings toward me. You see, the difference between me and Evan is that Evan is ten times hornier than I am.

  My big point was this: almost every couple in porn breaks up, and I didn't want to be another porn statistic. I didn't want the porn curse to hit us. I've seen it happen to other couples. Doing porn as a husband and wife team is safe, but once one branches out to do people outside the marriage, that's when the trouble seems to set in, and I feared for our perfect marriage.

  After the initial shock wore off, I was able to think rationally about the situation. I would be a hypocrite to not let him do other women for movies. I was doing other men and it didn't hurt our marriage one bit. It's just fucking, and with all the crew and cameras around, it's more of a job than an intimate situation. We're all professionals. You shake hands with your costar, you do your job, and you leave. There's no attachment. If I wasn't in porn and Evan wasn't doing a scene, would I have let him fuck another girl? No. But we are in porn and it was for a scene, so the answer had to be yes.

  And besides, I knew Evan loved me, and that is all that mattered. I knew I was his princess. I knew I had his heart. He reminded me of it morning, noon, and night from the time we met. Our marriage was solid. We weren't like other porn couples. I finally calmed down and realized that I could let him do this and it would be OK.