Black Magic

“She don’t want to stick. The girls are very very stubborn, sometimes. Just like human.”

I turned my head slowly to Elena, careful not to move the magnets under my neck. “You can tell whether they’re boys or girls?”

“Yes. Well actually, they’re hermaphrodite. When they first hatch, they are boys. Then, they grow up to be girls,” she explained in a Russian accent.

“So when they reproduce, it’s like a young boy with a grown woman?”

“Exactly, yes,” she laughed. “They cougars.”

It was three days before I was to get fucked by eight guys for my next big movie; I was laying on a massage table in a basement in the Pacific Palisades with my arms up over my head, leeches on my skin, sucking my blood. After extensive scientific (aka Internet) research, I had learned this method had been used since ancient times to make bruises disappear faster—up to fifty percent faster. Having spent the last week taking pineapple enzyme supplements, lathered in arnica, and walking around with my arms wrapped in heat compresses, this was the last thing left to try. And with my first gangbang in two years quickly approaching, I was desperate. Elena’s website was the first to come up when I searched “leeches” with my zip code.

“Do you think it’s gonna work?” I asked as she continued to force the stubborn black worm on my arm. I sounded pathetic even to my own ears; I couldn’t believe I was there. But if my bruises didn’t fade by Tuesday, the director would be very mad. I only shot one movie a month—it wasn’t much to request that I be bruise-free for those few days.

“Ah! There we go!” she exclaimed, just as I felt a pinch on my arm. “I knew she was hungry. Yes honey, it should work. Everybody different—but you should have lot less bruising by Tuesday. This also detoxify your blood. Any other problem you have? Stomach? Heart? Tell me now and maybe we can fix.”

I chewed my lip; I did, in fact, have another problem. There was a minor yet stubborn irritation on my nipple that had been coming and going for several months. Four doctors had failed to identify it, much less cure it—I had undergone two rounds of antibiotics before discovering it wasn’t an infection, an ultrasound before discovering it wasn’t cancer, and even a dairy-free diet before giving up and just living with it. I explained the situation to Elena. “We do muscle testing,” she answered matter of factly. “Extra sixty dollars okay?” I figured I was already there, so why not.

What proceeded was something even more ridiculous than putting leeches onto my arms. Elena strapped me into some shoes that looked like they belonged on a horse, shook my legs, and tapped my feet together. “May I have permission to heal your body?”

I looked up to see if she was asking me. Just as I was about to say yes, she held my legs up to show me. “See? Your legs are the same length. This mean yes.” I put my head back down and closed my eyes. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?

“Is it a virus?” She asked aloud and shook my legs. This time, I stayed put. “Aha! It isn’t. See?” She lifted my legs up, and sure enough, one leg was shorter than the other. “This mean no.”

After a round of questioning and shaking my legs, she concluded it was bacteria.

It was quite relaxing really, and I had almost fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, Elena was standing by my head now with a sheet of paper. “You read these out loud to me. A list of bacterias.”

“Me?” I looked at the list. It read like a passage from Harry Potter. “I don’t think I can pronounce half of these.”

“That’s okay. You just do your best.”

As I went down the list, announcing things like “Myxococcus xanthus,” “Bordetella pertussis,” and “Staphylococcus aureus,” I wondered if I was secretly being tricked into casting a spell on myself. Elena shook my legs after each bacterial name until we came upon one she was satisfied with. Nodding her head, she placed magnets all over my body, clipping them to my clothing.

“Okay sweetie, I leave you here with the magnets and my babies now, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Focus on healing. Getting rid of the bacteria, and letting the babies heal bruises.” I promised her I would, and she walked out of the room, presumably upstairs to her husband whom I had passed by on entering the house.

I looked around the room, careful not to move the magnets and leeches strategically placed all over me. There were crystals and plants and drawings of symbols I had never seen. Books with titles like Quantum Healing and Diary of a Yogi. I couldn’t help but keep thinking the words black magic.

How did I end up here? Not here, as in the Pacific Palisades, I knew how I had gotten here, by driving for over an hour in traffic. Not here, as in this situation; I knew I was here because I was stupid enough to get a procedure done on my arms a week before a shoot—which I knew would leave marks, because I had gotten the fat-freezing procedure done before. How did I end up here, the proverbial here, in this state of constantly trying to change my body? Certainly, being on camera was a big part of it. I was continuously forced to see myself, and critiquing my body was impossible to avoid. Then there was just the fact of being in Los Angeles in general—the superficiality capital of the world. A “10” anywhere else in the country was a Los Angeles “6.” And as much as I hated to admit it—the profession I chose, the business I loved so much—was full of young girls, ripe and new, as I only grew older, more washed up, closer to inevitable retirement. Every day, a girl turned eighteen; and every day, I was one day older.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and exhaled as I wondered how much time had passed. Probably less than two minutes. I thought back to a week ago, the day that was the cause of all this mess.

“So that’s Juvederm on the bridge of your nose, Botox on your forehead, ultrasound on the jawline, correction of the lips, and cool sculpt on the arms,” the doctor had confirmed, the corners of his lips turning up as the rest of his face stayed frozen.

It sounded like a lot more than what I had wanted. “Wait, but is there a way to do all of this without bruising? I don’t want my husband to know I’m doing any of it.”

The nurse chuckled. The doctor shook his head. “Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee you won’t have swelling or bruises. If you do, it usually subsides within two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” I sat up. “That’s crazy.” I thought about it. I was shooting in seven days—oh well, I’d just hope for the best that I’d heal in time. As for Toni, he would just have to accept me as I was. Or rather, as I was about to be. “Alright, let’s just go ahead and do it.”

“Great!” The doctor turned the corners of his lips up again. “I’ll have Nancy draw up the paperwork and take your payment. Then we can get started.”

If anything, I should have just gotten the nose, the jaw, the forehead, and the lips; I could have saved my arms for after the shoot. I’d have an entire month to recover before my next movie. But of course, I was in a rush to lose that fat on my arms. “I bet it’ll heal faster than two weeks,” I irrationally convinced myself. I was rarely an optimist unless I was doing something bad.

I didn’t always care this much about my appearance. Before starting porn, before moving to Los Angeles, I was quite content with the way I looked. There were countless things about myself I was insecure about, but when it came to looks, I was comfortable—or rather, it was something I didn’t give much thought to.

Growing up, the women in my family were always on this diet, that diet, participating in different revolutionary workout activities, trying creams and lotions that promised to reverse the signs of aging—had all that subconsciously affected me? In general, my family was overweight. My uncle, in his youth, was a sumo wrestler—which sounds like both a racist joke and a fat joke, but it’s just a fact. I was always marveled over as a child; “thin like a swan,” my relatives would all say in Japanese.

In school, no one ever commented on my aesthetics—I never felt exceptionally fat, thin, ugly, beautiful, or anything aside from just normal. Dieting was a completely foreign concept to me; I barely worked out, and I never watched what I ate. I wore makeup, but not a lot. I did my hair, but without products. The only cosmetic procedure I had ever done was a boob job for my twenty-first birthday—and really, who didn’t want bigger tits—I found people who obsessed over their weight/skin/face a bit trivial. I didn’t consider myself anything above average, but I felt hot enough for guys to like me, and that was enough.

When did it change? It’s hard to pinpoint when it started, the self-hatred. Was it gradual? It must have been.

Shortly after getting my breast implants, I became a regular on a radio show called “Bubba the Love Sponge.” It all came about in a strange way—I was stripping at the Hustler Club in New York City, where I saw a posting in the locker room:

WANTED:
Girls to promote HUSTLER CLUB
NYC on the “Bubba the Love
Sponge” radio show.
Compensation: 3 free house fees

I had never listened to the show, but I knew it aired on Howard Stern’s channel on Sirius. As a fan of radio and free house fees (on an average night, it cost five hundred dollars to dance at the club), I volunteered right away. I did a live interview on the show, they loved me, and within a few months, I moved down to Florida where they were based to be a regular on the show. In addition, they sponsored my first baby step into porn: a solo-masturbation pay site (i.e., I was naked and masturbating on camera, but not fucking other people).

In the year I was on the show, I gained thirty pounds. “We met you as a hot Asian, but now you’re a Samoan giant,” they joked on air. Off air, they suggested I sign up for a gym, which at the time also sounded like a joke. I laughed along, agreeing that I had gained weight—but it truly, honestly didn’t bother me. As a full-on sufferer of body dysmorphia now, it’s hard for me to believe that last sentence; if someone said that to me today, I would stop eating for days. But back then, the comments on my weight were mere observations; if anything, I felt the extra thickness made me sexier. My ass was full, my tits were bigger, and I felt I exuded more woman.

I entered the porn industry at 130 pounds, which for my height of five-foot-two is nine pounds over the healthy weight range. No one—not producers, fans, or colleagues—commented on my weight. No one suggested I shed any pounds, and I continuously got compliments on my butt, which was ample for someone of Asian descent. Proud of this asset and happy to be called thick, I didn’t think twice about losing any weight. In fact, it was the most proud I had ever felt about my looks.

This confidence was short-lived. Like I said, I can’t pinpoint exactly when I lost it. But I did. Watching myself on the screen, I noticed things about my body I never had before: a fold in my waist, dimples in my thighs, and was that—no, it couldn’t be—a double chin? Where there had never been problems before, I suddenly saw nothing but flaws.

It started with just five units of Botox. Watching myself give an upside-down blowjob on the Internet one afternoon, I noticed four deep lines that ran across my forehead. With every penis-thrust into my throat, the lines moved up and down—I was no longer able to pay attention to anything but the wrinkles. The next day, I made an appointment to get it fixed, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I had gone all that time without Botox; what was I thinking? I could have been giving wrinkle-free, upside-down BJs all this time!

And then, it was the exercise addiction. I hired a trainer and quickly became addicted to working out; some mornings, I awoke at 4:00 a.m. so that I could hit the gym before going to a shoot. For years, I refused to travel out of state unless the hotel had a fitness room, and days off were unimaginable. Always justified by “It’s better than being addicted to pretty much anything else,” I never saw anything seriously wrong with my compulsive behavior.

Over the years, I got fillers, lasers, peels, needles, everything short of surgery to keep myself looking as young and thin as possible. Boyfriends would come and go, shaking their heads each time I shelled out hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for some new and revolutionary procedure, as girlfriends eagerly joined in on the fun/torture, enabling each other in the never-ending obsession to better ourselves.

“It’s only because I’m on camera,” I convinced myself.

“Okay honey, let me see my babies here.” She was referring to the leeches. Elena walked into the room, and I opened my eyes. While the first two minutes had gone by painfully slowly, I was shocked to realize the twenty minutes was up. “Great! They look very, very full!”

I slowly looked down at my left arm, and saw that the leeches had doubled in size. As she peeled them off and put them into a jar, blood poured out of the holes they left. “Very good blood you have, you won’t bleed for more than twenty-four hours,” she smiled. Twenty-four hours sounded like a long time, but what did I know? Blood quickly pooled on the massage table under me, which she cleaned up with paper towels. The amount of blood scared me—she saw the fear on my face, and assured me: “This is normal, it mean you have healthy blood.” She escorted me out of her house wrapped in cotton balls and plastic wrap, but not before showing me pictures of something called a “Cleopatra facial,” which entailed placing leeches on my liver, then forcing them to vomit my collected blood, and proceeding to use that blood as a mask on my face. I smiled politely, falsely promising I would consider it, and drove home looking like a modern-day makeshift mummy. Somehow, I had also let her convince me to take the “babies” home—informing me that, otherwise, she’d just have to get rid of them—so I rode home with the leeches, the ones full of my blood, in a plastic iced-coffee cup.

By the time I walked into my house, the cotton balls on my arms had turned red and blood was piling up in the creases of the plastic wrap. I entered the living room where Toni was watching a movie, looking like I had gotten surgery in some shady basement (not far from the truth).

Toni looked up from the television, his smile quickly fading upon seeing me. “What are you up to now?”

“I have to go take care of this, I’ll be right out to explain,” I said as I quickly walked past him.

“What’s in the cup?” I heard him yell as I entered my bathroom.

“I’ll explain later!” I yelled back.

I replaced the cotton balls with some gauze, and brought the leeches into the kitchen. I wondered if it was bad that I was wrapping myself in gauze after she, the professional, had sent me home in plastic wrap. As I looked for something more suitable than a plastic cup for the babies, Toni walked in. “So, are you going to tell me what you’re doing?”

I looked at him out of the side of my eye and saw that he did not look happy. “I’m looking for a jar to put my leeches in.”

Toni put his face up to the plastic cup. “Euwwwwww.” He scrunched up his nose. “What are these for? Let me guess. To make you look younger?”

“I have to shoot in two days, and I still have bruises on my arms from the cool sculpt—I heard about this method so I went to the doctor to get the blood sucked from my bruise today.” Doctor. It was sort of true.

“You mean, the leeches are going to suck the blood?”

“No, they already did.”

“Are you supposed to do it again on yourself?”

“No.” I found a jar. “It’s done. How was your shoot today?”

“It was good, we had to change location, but after that it was smooth. Why did you bring them home?” “She was gonna kill them otherwise. Why did you have to change location?”

“Marianne double-booked, so she’s going to give us a free day at her house next week. What are you going to do with these worms?”

“I think I’m just gonna keep them alive. She said if I wanted to bring them back next time, it would be cheaper than getting her to use new leeches. So are you gonna use her house for the anal scene?”

“Who?”

“Marianne. For location.” I grabbed a leech with my fingers from the plastic cup to transfer to the Mason jar.

“No, I mean who are you bringing the leeches back to?”

“The lady who did the whole thing, she’s like a holistic healer or something.”

“I thought you said it was a doctor.”

“I mean she’s sort of a doctor but just like...an alternative medicine one.”

Toni watched warily as I struggled to get the leeches to stay in the jar. “You need to stop doing all this. You are approaching dangerous territory.” He said the last part extra slowly.

I shrugged and took the leeches to my bedroom.

The next morning, I went straight to the bathroom mirror after waking up. Unbelievably, my bruises were almost completely gone! I ran to the kitchen, where Toni was already up having coffee. “Look!” I threw my arms up. “The bruising has almost all disappeared!”

Toni looked closely and could not deny the results. “I have to say, Ashka, it looks really good.”

“Okay so now that it worked, I have to tell you how fucking weird this place was.” I told Toni all about Elena, the basement, the hocus-pocus she made me say out loud as she shook my legs. “I don’t know, I’m not expecting anything for the nipple though. I mean it was only sixty dollars, and I was already there,” I defended myself.

“Well how does your nipple look now?” Toni asked.

“I don’t know, I haven’t...,” I pulled down my shirt, and to my amazement, my nipple was completely clear of any irritation. A state I had not seen it in for nearly a year. “Holy fucking shit.”

Toni’s eyes widened. “So it worked.”

I was in disbelief. “I feel like fucking crying. You don’t understand how weird that place was! I can’t fucking believe this,” I started to laugh. “I feel like I’m dreaming.”

My nipple was healed, my bruises would likely be gone by the time I was shooting my gangbang, and I had proved Toni wrong—this was turning out to be an exceptional experience.

Later that day, I made an appointment for the Cleopatra facial.