The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (7 page)

Cherry the Tortoise, my pet (as seen on
The Surreal Life
).

Yes, that’s a rat. A hairless one, named Fetus. Howie Mandel had her before me. He called her Chemo.

With a baby lamb from a British TV show called
The Farm
. She was born ill and I helped nurse her back to health. She kissed me on the nose as thank-you.

In 2002, Adult Video News proclaimed me the Top Porn Star of All Time. (
Courtesy Adult Video News
)

In 2003 I joined the cast of
The Surreal Life
(first on the WB and later on VH1), with Traci Bingham, Vanilla Ice, Tammi Faye Messner, Trishelle Cannatella, and Erik Estrada. (
© WB/Brett Panelli)

Here are some of my more recent publicity shots. I can be whatever you want me to be. Ladies, please have a seat on this page so I can brag that you all sat on my face….

Ron Jeremy—Suave and Debonair? (
Courtesy Metro Studios
)

Ron Jeremy—Hustler and Sportsman? (
Courtesy Metro Studios
)

Ron Jeremy—Refined and Sophisticated? Ladies, a toast: “Here’s to you…on my schmekel!” (
Courtesy Metro Studios
)

Ron Jeremy—Friendly Neighborhood Porn Star!

I love public speaking and try to do as much of it as possible. Check your local newspaper—I may be coming to a town near you!

But even though I was falling in love with Mandy, on the side, I was still seeing Karen who had proven to be more than a passing fancy. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t cheating! Mandy was well aware that I was still screwing around with Karen. In fact, she had her fair share of boy toys, and I was fine with it. Our relationship was becoming serious, but it was by no means exclusive.

At a young age, I was very clear on the distinction between love and sex. Mandy could fuck anybody she wanted, and it never bothered me. She could’ve gone back to Charlie and his brawny shoulders for all I cared. Because Mandy and I had something more significant than just sex. Sex just for sex’s sake doesn’t mean anything. What would’ve made me insane with jealousy is if I ever found out that Mandy was cuddling with somebody. Oh God, the mere thought of it was enough to make my blood boil. Anything that seemed too romantic was off limits, as far as I was concerned. She couldn’t take a walk in the park with a guy and hold his hand, and I wasn’t crazy about candlelight dinners either. But cuddling was so out of bounds, it wasn’t even open for discussion. Cuddling was intimate. No, no, no cuddling! You put the dick in, you take it out, you walk away, end of story. You want to cuddle? Come see me.

I thought we had the perfect arrangement, but apparently Mandy didn’t feel the same way. One day, completely out of the blue, she put her foot down.

“I’m going to stop seeing other guys,” she told me. “And I want you to stop seeing other girls.”

“Okay,” I said. I couldn’t argue with her. I didn’t like the idea of having sex with just one person, but I was too much in love with Mandy to protest.

She gave me a disbelieving look, as if she knew I didn’t completely understand. “That means Karen, too,” she added.

“O-okay,” I said with a gulp. “I’ll stop seeing her.”

“That’s not good enough,” she said. “I want you to break up with her.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “You need to tell her in person. She won’t give you up unless you say the words. Do it today.”

I was like putty in her hands. What choice did I have?

So I slinked over to Karen’s house and told her that it was over between us. It took me a while to find the right words. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t know how to break up with her gracefully. She listened silently as I stammered and overexplained, trying to make her understand. She didn’t try to change my mind. She knew that she couldn’t compete with my feelings for Mandy. It was probably one of the most painful things I’d ever done in my life. I hated every minute of it.

We sat on her bed, and she cried, and I was helpless to do anything to make it better.

It was the first and
only
time that I ever dumped a girl.

I
’m not sure why Mandy and I eventually drifted apart. There were a lot of reasons I could point to. For one thing, I graduated early from high school and enrolled in Queens College, where I was hanging out with a very different crowd. But more than that, our lifestyles were becoming increasingly disparate.

A few years into our relationship, I learned that Mandy was taking drugs. Not just pot, but the harder stuff, like LSD. She had started experimenting when she was still dating Charlie, who socialized with Jamaican foreign-exchange students and had access to all the drugs he could handle. I didn’t know it at the time, but Mandy was regularly sneaking into the girls’ bathroom at our school to do drugs with her friends. It was a world that I couldn’t have known less about. I never tried drugs; I never even had an interest in them. I smoked pot a few times during school field trips and didn’t care for it. Mandy was a different story. She loved getting high, and I didn’t have a clue how to help her.

She visited me occasionally at Queens College, and during the summers when I worked as a waiter at the Catskills. But her visits became less and less frequent. The last time I saw her, she was at a drug rehabilitation center in New Jersey. I heard from a friend that she kicked the habit and went to college, where she got straight A’s, and that she was now working at a lab for a major chemical company. But she never contacted me again. To this day, I still don’t know where she is and what she’s doing with her life.