The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (47 page)

Somehow, though, I managed to pull it off.
**
The song didn’t glorify date rape, and it ended with a bit of a moral message. “I can’t take pity on men of his kind,” Brad sings. “Now he takes it in the behind!” To re-create these lyrics, I cast myself as the inmate who exacts anal revenge on the convicted date rapist. We had to be very careful with how much we revealed. MTV was not about to let us show an actual
Deliverance
-style man rape, so we had to imply what was about to happen. In my scene, I embraced the convict from behind and pulled back his hair, giving the camera a leering smile. It was suggestive but not so suggestive to catch the attention of the MTV censors.
*

A lot of musicians have used my name in their lyrics. In the Sublime song “Caress Me Down,” Brad claimed that he was “hornier than Ron Jeremy.” A tall order, but I gave Brad the benefit of the doubt. In the hit single “Let’s Get Naked,” Tommy Lee bragged, “Rockin’ my porno tape / bigger than Ron Jeremy.” He’s not, but it’s cute that he would think so. And LL Cool J mentioned me on the
Walking with a Panther
album, in whose lyrics he said, “J stands for Jeremy.” Then he sang “sucker MCs really make me sick. I’m so bad, I can suck my own dick.”

It’s nice to know that I have a following among metal bands and rappers, but some of my musical admirers haven’t been quite so obvious. In 1999, I flew to Canada to do a comedy show at the Thunderdome in Edmonton. I checked into a local Westin Inn and learned that members of the boy band *NSYNC were staying at the same hotel (they were performing at a nearby stadium). Over the weekend, I began getting phone calls from underage girls who were convinced that I was actually *NSYNC singer Joey Fatone.

“Hey, Joey,” the girls cooed. “We love you.”

“Uh, actually, this is Ron Jeremy,” I told them.

“Yeah, yeah, we know. So listen, Joey, are you gonna sing ‘Tearin’ Up My Heart’ tonight?”

“How should I know? Seriously, I’m not Joey.”

“C’mon, Joey, stop playing hard to get.”

“Do I
sound
like him?”

After fending off dozens of calls from breathless teenage girls, I finally went down to the front desk to find out what was happening. It turned out that there were
two
Ron Jeremys registered at the hotel. The other Ron Jeremy was actually Joey Fatone, who had been using my name on the *NSYNC tour to disguise his identity. His fans had somehow cracked the code, and if it wasn’t for the unfortunate coincidence that I was staying at the same hotel, they might very well have tracked him down.

They wanted to talk to a young, handsome pop star. But instead they got me, a chubby porn actor. To make matters funnier, Joey had been getting some of my phone calls.

I left a note and photo for Joey at the front desk. “Dear Joey,” I wrote. “I love the attention I’ve been getting from these young women over the phone. Hope to meet you someday. You guys are a great act. Love and kisses, the
real
Ron Jeremy. P.S. Please call Michelle in Alberta. It sounded important.”

Though I meant it as a private message to Joey, the letter was somehow leaked to MTV, and Kurt Loder recited it verbatim during an on-air special report. It soon became international news, and the letter was mentioned on VH1, E!, and Howard Stern, as well as in the
National Enquirer
and the back page of
Time
’s 2000 millennium issue.

I ran into Joey a few months later at a party in L.A., and he greeted me with a big hug.

“Thanks for the publicity,” I told him.

“Thank
you
for the letter,” he said, laughing. “And just so you know, I’m not using your name anymore.”

“Well,” I said, “It wasn’t working anyway.”
*

H
ollywood was a very different place in the new millennium. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, it was not too common for a porn star to be welcome on prime-time television. But audience tastes were changing. They were bored by the same old sitcoms and dramas. They wanted to watch
real
people doing
real
things that were unexpected and always unscripted. So by the late 1990s, TV networks across the world responded by filling their schedules with reality shows, making overnight celebrities out of regular Joes. But the reality phenomenon was also a boon to guys like me. I had just enough fame—or maybe infamy—to appeal to an audience’s voyeuristic curiosity. Even the most porn-loathing families in Middle America might want to know what I was
really
like.

In 2001, I was invited to be a contestant on the Newsmakers edition of the NBC hit game show
The Weakest Link
. I competed against reality-TV actors and former child stars like Gary Coleman and Corey Feldman. The host, Ann Robinson, was a redheaded Englishwoman who delighted in making a mockery of her guests. I knew that she’d make no exception with me, and I was not disappointed.

Playing coy, she asked what exactly I did in my movies. “In the regular features, I act,” I told her. “In the adult features, I act and do other things.”

“What other things?” Robinson demanded.

Gary Coleman, who had recently admitted to being a virgin, said, “He does what I haven’t done.”

Robinson wasn’t about to let me off the hook so easily. “Then what happens?” she persisted.

“We make a very funny noise, get our paycheck, and leave.”

The audience laughed, but Robinson wanted the nasty details. “Tell me the noise you make,” she said.

“Well, the ending noise sounds a little like this:
uuugh
.”
*

I did pretty well in the game itself. I lasted down to the final minutes before missing a question about Natalie Portman and getting voted out. Robinson usually dismissed the losing contestants by saying, “You are the weakest link. Good-bye.” But with me, she added a groan. “Uuugh…good-bye”

My appearance was so well received that other reality-show offers came pouring in. I flew to Britain for Channel Five’s
The Farm
, where I lived on a meat farm with celebrities like Flava Flav, model Emma B, actress Charlene Tilton, Prime Minister John Majors’s daughter-in-law Emma Noble, and others. In 2003, I joined the cast of the WB’s
The Surreal Life
,
*
which included former
CHIPs
star Erik Estrada, televangelist Tammy Faye Messner, rapper Rob Van Winkle (better known as Vanilla Ice), the
Real World
’s Trishelle Canatella,
Baywatch
star Traci Bingham, and my tortoise, Cherry.
**

For two weeks,
The Surreal Life
cast lived together in a Hollywood Hills house
***
and had our lives recorded. We were allowed some privacy in the bathroom but only if we ventured in alone. Any time two or more people were present in the same room together, a camera would be right there, watching our every move.

Because I was the first porn star many of them had ever met in the flesh, my female castmates—with the exception of Tammy Faye—were curious to see the penis.
Baywatch
babe Traci Bingham was especially curious about getting a look at my appendage. She’d occasionally follow me around the house and tug at my pants, or wake me early in the morning to try to yank off my blanket.

I wasn’t completely opposed to giving Traci a peek. I gave her my standard deal: “If you show me your boobies, I’ll show you my penis.” She never agreed. Apparently she thought that she could get a free show without giving anything in return. Well, tough luck! “If I don’t see the boobies,” I told her, “you don’t see the schlong.”

Trishelle was the first cast member brave enough to strip. During a cast field trip to a nudist resort, she came out for dinner with a towel wrapped tightly around her chest, and while we ate she slowly found the courage to let it fall to her waist. When the towel was cast aside, she quickly grabbed for a napkin, using it to cover her crotch. We all stared, of course, if only because a naked pair of breasts is the last thing you expect to see while dining on lobster. She was so embarrassed it was adorable. She kept yelling at us, “Quit looking! God, you fucking pervs!”

A deal was a deal. I promised the cast that I would get naked if one of them did it first, and I’m a man of my word. I went back to a dressing room to disrobe. I took a deep breath, threw open the door, and walked outside.

Trishelle took one look at me and shrugged. “I had a boyfriend who was as big.”
*

After dinner, we lounged in the Desert Shadows Jacuzzi. Trishelle was still topless, but she’d slipped into a G-string when nobody was looking. Traci finally agreed to join her and strip down to her birthday suit. But she was shifty about it. She decided to go bottomless, because once she was in the water the Jacuzzi’s bubbles would conceal her goodies. She wiggled out of her bikini bottom and dived in, and nobody was the wiser. I thought this was a brilliant idea, so I threw off my towel and jumped in next to her. Below the waist, we were both naked as jaybirds, but the the
Surreal Life
cameras weren’t able to catch any of it.

Not that it stopped the show’s editors from implying that something naughty was happening. When I gave Traci a quick peck on the lips in the Jacuzzi, the editors played back the footage in slow motion and freeze-framed it, so that it
appeared
as if I was giving her a long, passionate kiss. Even her fiancé was a little jealous about this.

But it wasn’t all innocent fun. I suppose it’s time to spill a few beans.

A few weeks earlier, Mark Cronin, the executive producer, asked me to host a barbecue at the house. The rest of the cast would be down in the city, attending Tammy Faye’s book signing, so I could have the entire place to myself.

“Just bring over a few of your friends,” Mark told me. “It’ll be fun.”

A few of my “friends”? Yeah, I knew
exactly
what he was driving at.

“Oh sure,” I said. “I’ll invite over some guys I know from Harvard and Stanford. We’ll sit around the pool and sip on tea with our pinkies in the air and discuss Shakespeare and Nietzsche and world politics and Steven Hawking’s theories on the expanding universe.”

Mark’s face went pale. “Uh, actually, those aren’t the kind of friends I’m talking about.”

“Oh, you mean
porn stars
? Wow, I don’t know. I can make some calls, but I don’t really know many porn stars who are available.”

“Just shut up and do it, okay?”

How could I blame him? Mark wanted ratings, and naked women were a surefire way to get huge ratings. So I called Tabitha Stevens and Jacklyn Lick and Lisa Sparks and a few other porn starlets whom I knew from L.A. Dennis Hof flew in from Nevada with a posse of girls from the Bunny Ranch.
*
I also invited Andy Dick and members of the band Digital Underground. By the next night, the the
Surreal Life
house looked as if it had been overtaken by an AVN convention. We cooked some food and skinny-dipped in the pool and gave Mark more long, lingering shots of naked flesh than he could possibly use.

And you’ll never guess what happened next. The cast came back
early
from Tammy Faye’s book signing. What a shocker! It was almost as if the producers had
planned
it. But no, they wouldn’t be that devious and cunning, would they? They wouldn’t want Tammy and company to stumble across a porn-star pool party right in full swing, would they?

It wasn’t nearly as scandalous as it appeared on TV. Tammy ran back inside when she realized that some of my friends were naked, but the rest of the cast was happy to join the party. They didn’t jump out of their clothes, but they weren’t shy about socializing with my guests. Erik later bragged that one of the women offered him an “oral compliment.” And Traci almost joined us in the Jacuzzi until her fiancé showed up and ruined the mood. How dare he?

The next day, rumors started circulating that I had sex in the Jacuzzi. Rob Van Winkle saw Tabitha sitting on my lap, and he was convinced that we were doing something more under the cloud of Jacuzzi bubbles than just a friendly snuggle.

“That is
not
true,” I told him. “Did you see her bopping up and down on me?”

“Well, no,” Rob admitted.

I stuck to my story to the very end. I knew that if the cast believed that my DNA had been floating around in the pool, they would’ve been too squeamish to swim in it again. Even during the final episode, as the cast said their good-byes and left the house for the last time, I said, “This was the longest I’ve ever gone without sex in my entire life.”

Well…that wasn’t entirely true.

Okay, fine, it wasn’t true at
all
. I was lying. I
did
have sex in the Jacuzzi.

I didn’t mean for it to happen. Tabitha and I were just cuddling at first. But she was naked, and I was desperate. It’d been at least six days since I’d had any nookie, and I had already forgotten what the inside of a vagina felt like. I wasn’t going to try anything with Tabitha because the cameras were pointed at us, and Rob was sitting just a few feet away. But Tabitha took pity on me. She could feel my growing erection and with just a flick of her wrist she pushed my bathing suit to the side and wiggled down on top of me.

We tried to be surreptitious. And I
did not
climax in the Jacuzzi, so at least when it came to that, I never lied to the cast. My “kids,” as Erik so callously called them, did not get any free swimming lessons that night. But as for the sex part, well, I like to think of it as a white lie. I only had a tiny bit of sex, just enough to get a taste. It was like a conjugal visit.

Of all the friends I made on
The Surreal Life
, I probably had the best connection with Tammy Faye.
*
Which was ironic, because we were the two people nobody expected to get along. She was an evangelist preacher and orthodox Christian, and I was a porn star. Not exactly a match made in heaven. But Tammy and I bonded. She recognized that I wasn’t such a bad guy after all, and though she never approved of my line of work, she respected me and always treated me fairly. She even told Larry King and other interviewers how much she liked me (and my pet turtle). When I brought Rick James on the show (one of his last public appearances before his untimely death), it was as a gift to Rob, who was a longtime fan. What TV viewers never got to see was Rick singing and playing the acoustic guitar. For some reason, WB never used this footage. He sounded so good, Tammy Faye got out of bed (it was late at night), and joined the rest of the cast on the couch, to hear him sing. I think she even sang with him. A really great moment.
**