‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (6 page)

When I think back on that time now, the only thing that got me through it was the memories of my father. From the time I was an infant on through to when he passed away, I was always daddy’s little girl, I was his princess. I had fun. My dad was awesome. My father was a very, very tall man; he had a couple of tattoos. He was very good looking guy, and very smart. His ethnic background was Russian and a hint of Dutch while my mom’s lineage was Brazilian mixed with Portuguese specifically, which I think helps to explain her draconian ideas on child rearing. My father was a friend to me when I really needed one, but also there when I really needed my father in my life. He made me feel very safe, very loved, and very supported in many ways. He was really the perfect father. As such, by the time he got sick, given the kindness I felt in my heart toward him comparatively to the other men in my life during that time, it saved me from being bitter about his dying when I needed him most in my life. If he’d ever known what Dick had been doing to me, he would have killed him, but I couldn’t bear for him to know that was going on while he lied dying a little each day in that awful hospital room. I’d come to see him, but a lot of times, I couldn’t go because I was black and blue, and makeup wouldn’t cover it up. It would have been harder on my dad to have seen me like that and have been too weak physically to do a thing about it. So that kept me from seeing my father as much as I’d have liked to. He knew Dick and I were having problems, and would give me money from time to time to help pay off Dick’s debts, but I know he wished he could have done much more. He was just too weak by that point. I got to visit with him one final time before they put him on a respirator, and I remember he couldn’t talk much, but seemed really happy to see me. That’s all that mattered to me at that point.

Following his death on April 15th, 1992, the funeral was just as much of a fucking mess as I was. My mom kept his family out of the wake and had him cremated. She even made me go with her to watch his body burn — that was extremely devastating. That fucked me up pretty badly, to the point where I became really non-functional for a while. I felt alone…I had nobody to turn to. That made things even worse with my mom, because she had hidden his ashes from me, than convinced me to sign over my Power-Of-Attorney rights because my dad’s relatives were suing me in Probate Court over my dad’s estate. Whenever I’d try to bring something up about my dad or want to talk about his death, my mom would just bring up something negative about him that just wasn’t true. She wasn’t the most supportive person during that period, and I don’t know if it was her trying to be protective in her own twisted way, but it really made things hard for me. I tried to kill myself. I was alone and without my dad. A big part of me died when he left this world. I sliced my wrist vertically trying to possibly see my dad again and escape my hell. Unfortunately, the nosey neighbor came downstairs and stopped me. I left the door open by accident and she had come to invite me to a movie. I wish she just let me die in peace.

So coming out of that horrible spring, the summer just continued in the dysfunctional pattern it had for the four years prior. We kept going to these conventions, which I tried my hardest to find some enjoyment in, despite the company, but even that was hard when I would put in most of the effort and watch Dick reap the reward from me every time. We would routinely clear $3000 a weekend and Dick would always keep ALL of the money, not the lion share, all of it. During this same period, he decided to make a wise business investment in this crap-blue van that eerily resembled Buffalo Bill’s from Silence of the Lambs, or perhaps something you might see a child molester driving around in at 3 in the morning on some dark street. The fucking thing even had one of those cheap murals on the side that looks like some cheap painting from a Chinese Fast Food Take-out Restaurant, or a white-trash art print you’d by at the carnival in Coney Island. Dick made me buy the van in my name since his credit was as shitty as he was. Prior to that, he’d driven this shit-brown station wagon, which I almost lost my life in once. It seemed like each year that went by, Dick got a car that was that much shittier, and symbolically parallel to the level our relationship had sunk to by that point. It was bad enough the way Dick treated me, but that he’d gone from a Firebird to a shitty brown grocery-getter to a child molester van just didn’t help from a matter of presentation. Not so much in the way I wanted to be seen, but in terms of how much he thought his shit didn’t stink! It was ridiculous the way he and his wanna-be Ramone, white trash Jersey buddies would strut around the toy conventions, acting like High Rollers on the floor of some Vegas casino.They certainly didn’t have limos or high line sports cars sitting outside and what was more pathetic than anything was that Dick treated his piece of shit cars better than he ever did me.

A prime example was the before mentioned shit-brown grocery getter station wagon. I almost lost my life in the previous winter. We’d been on the way to a toy show, driving through North Bergen to get to the Jersey Turnpike via Tonelle Avenue, which is the busiest Avenue for traffic in North Bergen. It was very icy out, and Dick had decided to take a shortcut down this really steep hill, and ended up in even worse of a traffic jam than we were already in. So while we were stuck for the moment in a line of cars, he told me to stay with the toys, and got out to check with some cop regarding the traffic situation. When he did, he left the car on, sitting pointed at a steep, downward angle in park, running without the parking break on. So while I was sitting in the station wagon, the cars in front of us began moving, and then some other car started sliding behind us, and Wham!, rear-ended our car, which sent the station wagon racing, slipping and sliding down the hill toward Tonelle Avenue, and all the oncoming traffic. While I’m freaking out watching my life flash before my eyes as we head directly for a major intersection with no cars in front of ME to stop the car, I can hear Dick slipping and sliding behind me yelling ‘The toys, the toys!’ I didn’t know what to do, I was trying to press the emergency brake, it wouldn’t work, and I just kept sliding toward the intersection. He clearly didn’t give a shit about me, and that’s what I was focused on more than anything. Well, thank GOD, about 10 feet before I WAS about to slam into the traffic, the car slid to the left into a curb and then a wall. Now with any other guy, you’d think that when he reached the car, the first thing he’d be doing was checking on his girlfriend who’d almost just lost her life, right? Not Dick, who, upon reaching the car, yanked the door open and franticly asked ‘Are the toys okay?’ His next comment after seeing his merchandise was intact was to remark, ‘Good thing the car is okay.’ He never made mention of me once, or showed even the slightest sign of concern about my well being.

When the cop got down to the car, the first thing he did was check on me, and when he heard Dick commenting about the car and the toys, gave him a disgusted look and offered to call me an ambulance. Dick, of course, refused for me, because he had a toy show to get to after all! I couldn’t believe the next comment he made, which was ‘Well, it’s a good thing we got hit now we’re past the traffic jam.’ For the next hour and a half driving to the show, I was in silent but visible state of panicked shock, which Dick clearly saw but ignored. Even when we got to the show and Dick went around telling everyone about how close his toys had come to getting destroyed, he didn’t mention me once. When his friends did make any inquiry into how I was doing, Dick said, ‘Oh, she’ll be fine. If she says anything else, she’s a fucking baby.’ I was still so shook up that I was setting up the show a little slower, and he told me ‘If you can’t set this stuff up, then you’re a whiney little
CUNT
, and you shouldn’t be here.’ I should have seen from that day how out of whack his priorities were, but still I didn’t leave him. As bad as that story was, a contender for my worst experience with Dick ever was at a convention in Atlantic City a year later once he had moved from the shitty, brown grocery-getter to the Buffalo Bill Serial Killer/Child Molester crap-blue Van. This was one of the biggest toy conventions of the year, and we were in the hotel room getting ready for the show, and Dick saw a bunch of money I had from dancing. Well, naturally, since he never gave me any, he assumed I had stolen it from him, accused me of stealing from him, and slapped me. He, of course, also accused me of cheating on him. I guess by that point I was starting to get tired of not fighting back, so I slapped him back, and he pulled a knife on me. It wasn’t that he carried a knife on him regularly, he just happened to have one for the show. He held it to my throat and told me he was going to ‘stick a knife in my
CUNT
’ if I ever stole from him, those were his exact words. I was so frightened that time that I actually stood up for myself, kneeing him in the balls, for which he ended up slamming my head against the wall so hard I passed out briefly afterward. After that, I started carrying a switch blade on me.

For as unfortunate as the way Dick treated me at the trade shows, I actually did enjoy them outside of that, namely when Dick was off strutting around the convention floor like Tony Soprano with his Guido, wanna-be Ramone buddies. After a while, I had started collecting vintage Barbies, which I wanted to sell at the shows, but of course Dick wouldn’t permit it, so I had to make deals on the side while he was off strutting. I actually met an ok person there, Mike a.k.a. Sickie. The circumstances of that were actually pretty funny, because like many other urban legends, Sickie was born in the back room of a tattoo parlor in the Bronx. Basically,

Barry, another regular at the toy conventions, told me that Sickie was the one who’d told Dick about my dancing, which had earned me one of asshole’s famous physical and verbal lashings. Naturally, I was pissed about it, and had been dying for months to know who had ratted me out. I called Sickie pretending to be someone else, which would become our theme in the years to come, and confronted him on why he’d outted me to Dick? Well, he denied it, and told me it was actually Barry who’d seen me there, which meant he was the only one who could have told Dick from that circle. It made sense once I got to know Sickie. Even though I yelled at him pretty hard that first time we spoke, he came up to me at the next toy show and gave me a Casper Bobble-Neck toy as a peace offering and we became fast friends after that. He’d feel very bad for me, because he always used to watch me sitting there like a beat-up dog, so he used to bring me little presents from time to time to cheer me up. What really made us bond though was our fourth or fifth phone chat, when we started making prank calls together. Sickie and I were like a couple of 14-year-olds in terms of our sense of humor, we were both very immature and pranked everyone from his ex-girlfriends to other toy dealers to random strangers, a pastime that we’ve continued through present day. Socially, we mostly saw each other at the toy shows and he was always by himself. I tried to invite him out with Dick and me to lunch, but Dick didn’t think he was cool enough. I think I needed a friend in that business, I felt like such an outcast. I felt like no one wanted to talk to me, and they talked down when they talked to me, because I was Dick’s girlfriend. He was more like a friend to hang out with and bum around with. We’d go to different weird toy stores, flea markets, different close-out sales, and he’d teach me about the business: how to pick what merchandise to buy, where to buy stuff from, how to price things, things like that. He was very low profile at the shows, and mostly bought and sold stuff in bulk. We’d go out to lunch at Mumbles, just terrorize the town; we were basically hang-out buddies. Ironically, I spent more quality time with Sickie than I ever did with my own boyfriend, and Sickie certainly took more of an interest in me than Dick ever did at that time.

At the heart of it, Dick was just a bastard who beat on me whenever he had a short coming, or did a bad business deal, I was to blame. I was really afraid to speak back up to him then, both because I thought he was the only man who would love me, and because I feared what he would do to me physically if I had. Thinking back on this now, I’m saying to myself the same thing I bet you’re saying, WHAT AN ASSHOLE!! I remember once we went to Tampa to visit friends, and he hit me so hard that he broke my gum, and I had to go to the emergency room.The police came to question me about it, and of course, I covered him like a jackass. I knew we were in this downward spiral, and I knew we’d have to hit rock bottom before I’d be completely free of him. That moment came when he nearly took my life. We were at a convention in Atlantic City, and we were in the hotel room fighting over something. Anyway, I guess I’d gotten to a point where I started to say to myself, ‘I’m not going to take this,’ and it was a rare thought, because it was one of only a couple times that I hit him back. Well, he responded by pulling a knife from his back pocket and pressing it to my throat. I was scared by the look in his eyes, but I managed to knee him in the balls and get out of the room before he could do anything.

By the time I was 21 years old and worn down to the bone, the battered-woman syndrome had come full-circle in my relationship with Dick. I was working full-time and paying most of his bills, still getting over my father’s death, receiving regular beatings by this psychopath, who at this point I was staying with out of fear more than any other motivation. As the holidays approached, the camel’s back finally started to crack. First off, when we exchanged gifts on Christmas day, Dick had — in plain view of me — this enormous Victoria’s Secret bag that held a Santa’s Sack full of lingerie, while his present for me was so small, you could have fit it comfortably in a fucking brown lunch bag. On top of that, when he took me to his family’s house, he pretty much ignored or insulted me the whole time in front of his family. He wouldn’t even hold my hand. So needless to say, that holiday was awful. My mom wasn’t much help, and I didn’t have my father, so I felt almost entirely alone. When New Year’s Day came, the hell was finally raised. Dick basically blew me off New Year’s Eve to go out to some strip club with his friends, ended up hooking up with some gutter-snatch named Barbara, who he ended up leaving me for the very next day. The biggest irony about that one was that for all the shit he gave me for dancing and liking clubs, he met Barbara at a STRIP CLUB! What frustrated me about the whole way the break-up went down was that I had no closure. All he basically said to me was ‘Maybe we shouldn’t see each other anymore.’ So we didn’t talk for like a week after that, and finally told me to come over and pick up my things. So stupidly hoping there might be a final chance for things to work out, plus in an attempt to get my things back, I went all the way out to Jersey in a snowstorm, and he wasn’t even home.The fucker stood me up, and to top it all off, leaving I had a nasty spill down a steep, icy hill and almost broke my head open. I knew he was home too; he just wasn’t answering

I went into his van on my way back, and found all these love notes from Barbara, so it was obvious they’d been seeing one another before New Year’s Eve. Looking back on it now, I count myself lucky, because if I had married him, I’d never have lived out the wild adventures I had in my later 20s, and my life would have been horrible. I would have ended up a battered, Jersey housewife. Two weeks after that, my mom and I started getting all these notices in the mail about tickets for his Child Molester van, and I told my mom that I had put the van in my name. So my mom called Dick and demanded he pay the tickets, which he refused to do, so we had his van towed in immediate retaliation since it was in my name — but the satisfaction was only fleeting. He called my mom after that and told her I was dancing, which I was able to refute thankfully — I guess I did have some natural ability as a litigator, because I had to pull off a Perry Mason-sized moment to convince her that he was lying. Dick left me raped financially and emotionally, with my spirit beaten down to a point that I could hardly recognize myself inside anymore. Everything that my mother had raised me to be in terms of toughness, he had beaten out of me — for the moment anyway. In addition to the emotionally shitty shape I was in, the aftermath of our break-up financially was even worse, because he had stopped paying the bills on credit cards he’d made me take out for him in my name, student loans, his van payments, the works. So I was dancing primarily at that time to pay off those debts, and I’m talking about thousands and thousands of dollars. Even still, I was still paying that debt off to this day. We’d been together for 5 years, and they were to date the most hellacious years of my life. I am still earning back my pride in the pages of this book.

That said, I’m not above admitting I’ve dreamt for years that Dick would die a slow and violent death, and that his soul would burn in some form of eternal hell and damnation, but it never came. Men, by and large, always seem to get away with beating women in this country because the problem is symptomatic. Over 75% of women in prison for murdering their spouses were the victim of domestic battery, and yet congress refuses to pass any sort of shield law regarding sentencing.The system is truly set up as an old-boy network, fearing that if women were given the benefit of a doubt that their violence was retaliatory and justified in context of the larger abuse pattern by their husband. Having been there, I know every one of them were motivated by a cornered sense of helplessness that reduced them to primal defense mechanisms that would typically exist only among wild animals. It would never matter if Dick had been arrested for every time he’d hit me, he still would have been given some probation or fine, or perhaps some joke’s worth of jail time. Then he would have gotten out and done it again, because the slap he received on the wrist was never as powerful as the one he gave me regularly across the face. I was never strong enough to slap him back, because it would have made it worse the next time. On top of that, he threatened to kill me if I left him more than once and backed it up with his fists. Men do that by the millions across our country and the courts tolerate it by not sentencing men to more substantial jail time, nor by giving women the proper reprieve or protection under law of justifiable homicide for being driven to that extreme by their abusive partners. Women who kill men who abuse them are reacting and almost every time they were driven there by the savagery of the abuse suffered at the hands of their partner. It’s not vigilantism to defend your life and if I’d stayed with Dick, I might very well have been an inmate rather than movie star. You might be thinking right now, ‘Wait a minute Jasmin; you’re an actress, not an attorney!’That might be true if my mother wasn’t an extremely successful shark of a litigator who raised me in a house where there was constant debate. My argument stands on its own. I would challenge anyone to go through what I did and not feel this way. I do NOT believe in karma until something horrible befalls DICK.

If you haven’t ever dated a monster like this, consider yourself lucky, and read my story as a warning for your own love life. Many women who come from abusive backgrounds end up dancing, or even getting into adult films, I’d say 80% or more, because their self-esteem is beaten to such a pulp, that they become THAT DESPERATE for attention. I was a Columbia University student who became a FEATURE dancer and ADULT film star, so if I was driven to that sort of desperate extreme of escape, it should tell you how bad it can indiscriminately become for women in domestic violence situations. I’ve done my best to move on from the hell that Dick put me through and am finally started to believe in love again with my current relationship with Matt, my fiancé when we started writing this book. Not all men are like Dick. All women should take into account that statistically, a woman is hit every 14 seconds, as well as that, women who leave their batterers after staying in an abusive relationship are 75% more likely to be killed by the batterer than those who stay. As such, the only preventative measure is to leave the first time it happens. Period, there are no exceptions to this rule, only to the guy because I have a good one finally. I plan to hold onto mine, even as I try by the day to let go of the long-term pain Dick has caused me. I have never been a victim, and don’t want to be read that way. My life has not been cast in this experience, but it is a part of my fabric, and I live with it daily as a survivor of that bastard. I have the utmost respect for those of you who have gone through a similar nightmare, on any scale, and I hope we all move forward together into a time when this sort of shit will no longer be tolerated by society at large.

By this point, things with Dick were completely over and I was close to graduation. It still makes me sad to this day to know my father didn’t live to see me move on, but I was trying to make the best of things. Once asshole was out of my life, part of me felt like doing a jig on his ball sack with high heels sharpened into points. But in reality, my self-confidence was crushed. Following my break-up with Dick and my father’s passing, my mom sent me away to Brazil to get some air from the whole situation for about a week and then I visited France, Germany, and a few other places. After that, I went back to dancing, but really had no career-direction at that point. My mom kept pushing me to apply to law school, but I really had no interest in following in her footsteps. Then she switched to just pushing me in general to get my Masters, or a PhD, and so forth. My question was always: ‘For what?’ What good does that really do me if my heart isn’t in it, also I know many people who have graduated from law school or any number of other graduate programs who ended up without any grander job prospects, and $50,000 in new debt from the graduate loans. So my spring and early summer were really aimless, I just worked to pay off Dick’s debts. If I had any professional aspirations, they were to run or own my own business, because I had seen the money potential in the collectibles business for one example. I just couldn’t get out from under my bills long enough to get anything started on my own. I tried to have fun when I could. I’d go to the beach or pool and relax without worrying about Dick becoming paranoid over me saying hi to some guy, or for that matter, wondering if he was off in some motel room fucking some bimbo he’d met on the Casino floor or in a bar. I definitely felt alone in the world, I had some friends from dancing, but none whom I was very close with. One friend, Elise, was there for me, but I was largely alone. In general, I never had anyone there for me growing up, not when my father died, never.

My mom just insulted everything or talked down to me all the time in a very condescending way. She would be nice to everyone around me, be it my friends or whomever, so they would then think I was nuts and lying about everything she’d done. It was very much like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with my mom, and it wasn’t about a fucking curfew. It was the fact that I never did anything that was good enough for her, and there wasn’t ever even a fucking established bar to try and meet or talk, because she always moved it. If I was doing well, she’d set it higher, if I was at a low, she’d make it so high I never felt I had any potential of reaching a point where she’d accept me. Nothing was, or is to this day, ever good enough for her. Personally, I think she’s incapable of ever being happy. Her favorite word to describe my clandestine teenage activities:
PROSTITUTING
. I laugh at it now, but that was a fucked up thing for any parent to say to a child. How did she think that was going to make me feel about my self image? As far as I’m concerned, she’s as much to blame as I am for anything I’ve done since that she’s disagreed with in terms of my adult life. Frankly, she’s as responsible for my choices as I am, right or wrong, and if she’d been even a little more trusting with me as a teenager, I believe things would have turned out very differently. Even when I told her about my wedding plans, she shot that all to shit. I think she honestly wishes I could have stayed a 10 year old girl forever. Dick certainly never treated me any better. If anything he only added to that lack of confidence. Eventually though, if you beat anyone down enough, they either wither away and die off, or lash back out at the world.

My grandmother had died not even a year prior to my father’s death, in September of 1992, which was brutally hard on me, losing two people who were that near to me in such close proximity to one another. My grandmother had helped raise me, as a hands-on parent, and from you’ve read thus far, it’s clear I didn’t have a conventional parent-daughter relationship with my mother. I found out about sex from a therapist because my mother couldn’t have the conversation with me.The same with drugs: through a third party. I got used to that dynamic, as odd as it sounds, and so it made it easier to see my grandmother as sort of a surrogate mother in ways, because she made herself more emotionally available to me at times than my own mother did. My grandmother used to stand up for me when my mom would be off on one of her rants. In some households, grandparents are just that: grandparents. In other households, like mine, they’re more directly involved with child rearing, and my grandmother definitely helped to raise me. She was awesome; she always tried to see my side and would always do little things like sneak me cookies that my mom wouldn’t allow me to eat. Or she’d take me to Central Park and we’d go to the petting zoo and feed the birds together. I remember once she got me this ‘My Buddy’ doll that had these two red braids, and a red shirt, and blue pants, and these little black Mary-Jane shoes, and we’d have little tea parties with it. I remember my grandmother even coming to the beach at St. Croix once with my dad and I. I remember another time, I was 18 or 19 and had signed up with a modeling agency in New York, and wanted to get some portfolio pictures done. My mother as usual just started yelling at me, making a huge scene, and my grandmother came to my defense, told her not to yell at me, and in the end, my dad paid for the portfolio pictures. It sounds strange, but I think in a very ODD way, I felt at times more like my grandmother was my mother in terms of being my friend, but she was also a disciplinarian too. Lord knows she’d raised my mother, but I don’t even think my grandmother felt she’d been as strict with my mom as she was with me. I think my grandmother felt my mom was excessive a lot of the time, which is why she tried to make up for it with kindness. I miss my grandmother and my father dearly and daily — even as I sit here writing this book. The years since both their passing has given me some perspective and patience, but at the time, I was devastated and feeling aimless of direction or a care in the world.

By the fall of 1992, I was definitely not someone to fuck with. I had so much anger inside me toward men that I was walking around something akin to a ticking time bomb. One such example was the late spring following my break-up with Dick. I was hanging out at a bar on 8th street in the Village, and some scum-fuck came up to try and hit on me, and ended up grabbing me. So I told him to fuck off, and he responded by bringing drunken his friend back over, and they started fucking with me simultaneously. Well, I got scared, and I guess fear translated into me finally standing up for myself to a guy. My ulterior motivation was the fact that I had gotten off of a dancing shift and was carrying around a large wad of cash on me. I figured that if I had put up with Dick pushing me around, no fucking way was I going to take it from some drunken asshole. So basically I asked, ‘What’s your problem?’ to which the first drunken asshole replied, ‘Nothing, you just have a fresh mouth.’ So not knowing to this day what came over me, I said, ‘Do you want to step outside and talk about it?’ and I ended up beating the shit out of them! No bullshit, as soon as we got outside, the first guy said, ‘So what are you gonna do now?’ I replied, ‘I don’t know, what are you gonna do?’ and before he could respond, I broke a beer bottle against the guy’s nose and kicked the other guy in the balls. Then I started throwing hands, fists, and elbows at him and when it was over, I was thankfully still standing without a scratch on me. First off, any MALE who would actually be low enough to go outside and be willing to fight a woman my size has it coming, so I guess I had the element of surprise working for me. They’re lucky too, because I had a switchblade I carried around on me and was pissed enough to use it. Not to mention how drunk both of them were. When I was done, I just went back into the bar and continued drinking and they both went to the hospital. That’s a reflection of how angry I was at that time in my life — at the world — and at anyone who got in my face in even a remotely confrontational way. I was developing a hardened emotional shell to a world I felt at the time was very cruel to me for reasons I couldn’t understand. I never felt like a victim, but I definitely felt what I was getting — from Dick, from my mom, from my father dying — was undeserved, and I was truly confused as to why I had that coming. And it kept coming and coming, next up in the form of an asshole named Kurt. We’d started dating late in the next spring of 1993, and I’d met him under the auspice that he was a construction worker. When that veil was eventually pulled back, the truth would expose me to a world that both horrified and fascinated me in the same time…