The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (50 page)

The monogamy thing is difficult for me. I have no problem with emotional monogamy, but physical monogamy is different. I’ve sometimes asked my dad, “How did you do it, Pop? How did you stay married to the same woman for so many years?” He knew what I was really asking. It wasn’t marriage itself that confused me. It was monogamy. It was the idea that anybody could ever limit himself to just one sexual partner.

“Well,” my father said cautiously, “you just find ways to keep it fresh. You think of new things to do.”

“Like what?” I asked. “After thirty-some years, what is there left to do that you haven’t already tried? Do you hang from the chandelier, or hang glide into it?”

My hat goes off to anyone who can make monogamy work. I’ve known very few people who could pull it off (especially men). Even if they stay in the marriage, they’ll eventually give in to the temptation to cheat. If a guy is approached by a beautiful woman and she offers to massage his ball sack, no strings attached, he’s often going to say yes. I don’t care who he is. Most men cannot turn down free sex, and it has nothing to do with our emotions.
**

In most cases, the thing that bothers women about cheating isn’t the sex but the deception. It’s not cheating if you’re truthful about it and you’re willing to let your partner do the same thing. I’ve known some actors and rock stars who couldn’t grasp that concept. They’d go on tour and have sex with a different woman every night. But when they came home and their girlfriends so much as looked at another guy, they’d freak out.

When Juniper was breaking up our romantic relationship, I tried to explain this to her. I told her that the world is filled with men who consider swinging a one-way street. They’re too insecure or chauvinistic to realize that it’s something that can be shared. Most guys are going to cheat, and the best you can hope for is to end up with somebody who’s
honest
about it.

“Maybe,” she said. “But that doesn’t change anything.”

“Why can’t you give us another chance?” I asked her.

“Because you’re never going to change. Isn’t there a small part of you that’s tired of this swinging nonsense? It isn’t normal to be so obsessed with this.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed. I’m more like a bonobo monkey.”

“A what?”

“A bonobo monkey. They don’t just have sex for procreation, or when they’re in heat. They do it every day with a variety of partners. They’re one of the few animals that practice fellatio and group sex. And because of it, they’re very nonaggressive and peaceful. They’re the happiest, healthiest monkeys in the jungle because they’re too busy screwing. So I’m pretty sure that I evolved from a bonobo.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I’m more like a tamarin monkey,” she said, “or like most birds.”

“You mate for life?”

“Exactly.”

And that, in the end, is why Juniper and I decided to break up. I’m a bonobo and she’s a tamarin. As much as we loved and respected each other, we’re two very different monkeys.

I
can pinpoint the exact night that everything almost changed between Juniper and me. It was the moment when my feelings for her changed from like to love.

It was years ago, when Juniper and I were still a couple. She was sleeping at the time, which is usually when I feel the most affection for her. For as long as we’d been together, watching her sleep had been one of my favorite things. She doesn’t just lie there and breathe deeply. Her arms are outstretched, and she purrs like a kitten. And she has this adorable smile that just kills me. She looks so innocent and sweet and harmless. Sometimes when I come home late at night, I’ll just sit on the edge of the bed and watch her sleep.

She hates it when I do that. And she hates it even more when I bring friends to watch her. But I just can’t help myself. On some nights, I’ve invited porn stars like Taylor Wayne and Jacklyn Lick over to our apartment, and I’ll bring them into the bedroom just to look at Juniper.

“Have you ever seen anything so cute in your whole goddamn life?” I’ll whisper.

“Ronnie, why don’t you just give it up and marry that girl?” Jacklyn asked me. “It’s so obvious you’re in love with her.”

I guess it was.

As I already mentioned, she was sleeping.

And holding a bald, partially blind rat named Fetus.

As a kid, I once had a pet turtle named Timothy. But as an adult who travels constantly, it didn’t make much sense to leave an animal alone in an empty apartment. But Juniper is a veterinarian’s assistant, and she doesn’t think clearly when it comes to adopting pets. And big softie that I am, I’ve never been able to say no. It started with Cherry, a tortoise who hasn’t left my side since Juniper brought her home. That would’ve been enough for me, but Juniper pushed for more. A few years later, she adopted a rat. A skinny, hairless, partially blind, adorable rat.

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked when she walked into our apartment with the bald bundle of joy.

“What?” she said, clutching the naked beast to her chest. “I love rats. I had lots of rats as pets when I was growing up.”

“It’s a rodent. And they only live for maybe two or three years. You’re just setting yourself up for unnecessary heartbreak.”

Juniper fought for the rat, and it stayed. She named it Fetus because of its resemblance to a misshapen embryo that was all but begging to be aborted. And like a sucker, I ended up falling in love with the weird-looking thing. I told Juniper that I hated it, but she’d catch me sharing a meal with Fetus or spooning with it on the couch.

“You’re in loooooove,” she’d tease me.

“Okay, fine. You were right. Don’t rub it in, okay?”

We found out later that Fetus once belonged to the comic Howie Mandel. He’d given it up after his daughter went to college,
*
and it somehow got passed along to Juniper’s clinic. During a visit to Las Vegas, I learned that Howie was performing at the MGM, and I immediately called him to share the news that his onetime pet was alive and well.

“Oh my God!” Howie laughed. “What the hell is Ron Jeremy doing with little Chemo?”

“You called her
Chemo
?” I asked. “You are a sick, sick man.”

“Oh come on, you’re telling me she doesn’t look like a chemo patient? I’m just amazed that she’s still alive.”
**
He was so excited, he thanked Juniper on my cell phone. The MGM staff and Howie’s manager were in shock, and I didn’t know why. They explained to me that Howie is a germophobe. He won’t even shake hands with someone, let alone use their cell phone. I figured, heck, since he knows I’m in porn, maybe he knows I’m blood tested every month.

A year and a half later, Fetus was diagnosed with cancer. It was ironic, really, given her former name. Juniper and I spared no expense in treating her, but despite a successful surgery, the doctors couldn’t bring her out of anesthesia. The brave little rat fought for hours to stay alive but didn’t make it. And so, on a rainy summer afternoon in L.A., we drove to the hospital to have our beloved Fetus cremated and her remains placed in an urn that we could keep.

And that’s when I realized that I wanted to have children with Juniper.

I can’t really put my finger on what it was about that particular day. Maybe it was just the sadness of losing something that we both cared for. I don’t want to sound overly corny, but maybe it was the Celtic music playing on the radio as the rain battered against the car’s windows. But as I glanced over at Juniper and saw her sleeping, her tiny hands outstretched, I felt such a wave of love wash over me. I knew then and there that I wanted to be with Juniper for the rest of my life. And I wanted us to be something more to each other than just two friends who occasionally had sex.

“Hey,” I whispered, giving her shoulder a tender nudge. “Wake up. I need to tell you something.”

“No’ now, le’ me alone,” she said in that drowsy voice that just makes my heart ache.

“I think it’s time,” I said, surprised by my own certainty. “I think we should be parents.”

She shot upright in her seat. “What did you just say?” she asked, now very much awake.

“I want to have a baby,” I said. “I want to have a baby with
you
.”

We were mostly silent for the rest of the trip. Juniper didn’t say yes, at least not right away. She just wanted to sit with it for a while, maybe to wait to make sure that I wasn’t going to back down over time.

But I wouldn’t. I was serious. Over the past few months, I’d been having dreams about being a father. I dreamed that Juniper and I had an actual baby. And stranger still, when I woke up, I was sad to discover that it had been just a dream. I told my dad about these dreams, and he said, “Ronnie boy, that
means
something.”
*

Fathering instincts have a way of revealing themselves slowly. It may have continued a few years later, when I was on the British reality show
The Farm
.
**
Part of our duties involved attending to the ranch animals—milking and feeding them. During one of my first days at the farm, I helped deliver a baby lamb. She was born deformed, and even her own mother rejected her. Because I have a thing for outcasts, she became my favorite. I nursed her and took care of her for sixteen days until she was healthy enough to feed from her mommy. On some mornings, I’d jump out of bed and be in the barn before any of the other cast members were awake. I took to the role of nurturer like it was the most natural thing in the world for me.

At one point, Flava Flav—one of the other celebrity cast members—walked by and saw me sitting in the hay, coddling the baby lamb and feeding her from a milk bottle. He just shook his head and laughed.

“Dude,” he said, “you need kids.”
***

Juniper and I tried to get pregnant for almost six months, but it never worked, and we eventually gave up. Now, years later, I’d probably still want to give it a shot. But Juniper and I are best friends, not lovers, and I may have missed my chance.
*

For now.

W
here the hell am I?”

I rub a hand across my swollen eyes. I must have drifted off again. I haven’t slept in days, so it’s no wonder. I squint into the fluorescent lighting and try to get my bearings. It looks as if I’m in another airport, but which airport is hard to say. It could be Chicago, or New York, or even Miami. It’s difficult to tell anymore. If you travel as much as I do, all airports start to look pretty much the same.

I reach into the old plastic grocery bag that passes for my luggage and pull out my trusty binder. If there’s any hope of figuring out where I’m flying today, the answers will be there. I flip through the yellowing pages until I find today’s date.

Ah yes, I’m going to Florida to see Juniper.

I gave up on trying to convince her to stay. If she needed to get out of L.A. to be happy, I wasn’t going to stand in her way. But in the weeks after she left, we still talked almost every day, spending hours on the phone like two teenagers. Sometimes we had nothing of any importance to say, we just needed to hear each other’s voice. Other than the fact that we no longer lived in the same town, it was like nothing had changed between us.

A tinny voice over the airport PA system announces that my flight is boarding. I gather together my bags and head toward the gate. I feel naked, like I’m forgetting something. And I probably have, as I’ve packed unusually light for this trip. Juniper had only one request of me. She wanted me to come to Florida without any of the accessories that I cart around with me everywhere. No scripts, no magazine clippings in which I’m quoted, no souvenir T-shirts to sell to fans, not even a Polaroid camera for photos. She just wanted me, unencumbered by the weight of my incessant ambition.

We weren’t going to discuss weighty matters like “us” or “how can we make this work?” We were just going to forget about it all and act, well, for lack of a better word, like a “normal” couple. A couple of best friends.

I can be in Florida only for the weekend. After that, I have to be back in L.A. to shoot a scene for
Domino
, Mickey Rourke’s next film. And then I’ll be attending the premiere of
The Aristocrats
. I was sliced out of the final cut, but I’m given an “extra special thanks” in the closing credits, and I’ll be included in the DVD release. And then I’ll be starring in a new porno flick called
Very, Very Bad Santa
for Metro Interactive, promoting my line of Ron Jeremy rolling papers and my new line of toys for Pipedream Productions, meeting with Adam Rifkin to discuss his new movie, and—

What, you really didn’t think I was just going to forget about work completely, did you?

I’d give it all up for one more erection.

—Grocho Marx

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
n lieu of thanking those people who helped me with this book (we’ll get to that in a few pages), I’d like to take this opportunity to share something with you that I find important.

The fight against world hunger. Don’t laugh, I’m being serious.

The idea hit me while I was on the television show in England called
The Farm
. Now hear me out. I know that you probably didn’t pick up this book expecting to read about my humanitarian efforts. You wanted tales of porn and Hollywood gossip. And I hope that I gave you just that. But if there’s a chance that I can also use this book to make a difference, well, what sort of guy would I be if I didn’t try?

Below is a sample of a letter that I sent to the representatives of various celebrities who had publicly expressed interest in this subject. I’m not aware of their interest in
my
idea, but a few of their agents and managers have been very encouraging and enthusiastic. It’s my hope that by reprinting this letter in my book, it will get to people whom I couldn’t reach, and go places where I couldn’t go. If you want to take part, I encourage you to contact your congressperson and tell him or her about this idea.