The Prank

Mercury was in retrograde, which would be the worst time for a team-building weekend in Big Bear. Dave had rented a ranch for the entire summer to record an album with his band Mangchi, and he had invited the cast of the podcast up. The plan was to hang out, just relax, take some photos for our Instagram accounts, and, of course, record some episodes.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” I told Dave. “Mercury is in retrograde.”

Dave laughed. “You and that shit. Just come.”

“But it’s not good to travel when...”

“Just come, it’ll be fun.”

So we all went.

DVDASA had been going on for two years now. Although we preferred to call it a “show,” it was a podcast that my most famous friend David Choe and I had started after years of talking about wanting our own radio show. The letters stood for double vag, double anal, sensitive artist, but we told people it was short for David Asa. It had gained somewhat of a cult following and had even hit number one on the iTunes charts a couple of times. We recorded episodes every Tuesday with a group of Dave’s employees, none of whom wanted to be there. Dave and I were similar in many ways, one being that we both had a compulsion to share every thought with the world, the worse the thought, the better. Known to some as the “Facebook Artist,” Dave was a graffiti-artist-turned-fine-artist who was a legitimate millionaire. For this reason, we never had to worry about sponsors or making the show a lucrative endeavor—in fact, it only cost money; we used the show as our weekly social gathering, unfiltered and unedited. Each episode was supposed to be an hour and a half, but we were rarely able to keep it under three hours. We also tried to refrain from talking about anal sex every episode, and we always failed. As a podcast fan, I had to admit, our unorganized, irreverent, tasteless show was one that I would never listen to— but recording it was my favorite part of the week. The show was ninety percent of my social life; the other ten percent was in New York City, where I was returning to less and less, and Spiegler.

It’s impossible to tell a DVDASA story without describing each cast member. So here is a brief bio of each of them, based on how they’d be if they were my husband:

BOBBY TRIVIA

Bobby is probably the most husband material out of all of the guys. As we often say, Bobby is the purest one of us all—he believes in things like true love and equal-effort sixty-nine-ing. He’s Dave’s money guy, which proves his trustworthiness—I mean I doubt it gets any more reliable than being an accountant in general. He could do my taxes every year, which would be amazing, because it’s always been my dream to just blow someone and have that magically taken care of. And how fucking great would it be to end every night with a round of trivia? The loser would have to be on top the next time we fuck. His skin is naturally this dark golden hue, which is actually my tanning-color goal—so that would be great if we made babies. Speaking of which—I truly believe Bobby would make a great dad. He’s funny, he’s patient, he’s kind, he’s a lot like my own father, and he actually looks a little bit like him too. That part could be weird.

MONEY MARK

Money Mark is someone with equal amounts of pros and cons, marriage-wise. On one hand, he is the only real grownup on our show, he is the ideal age for me, he is an amazing cook, he is funny, he doesn’t air his dirty laundry on the show like the rest of us, and oh yeah, he is a musical genius. He has kids, which would normally be on the con side of the list, but his kids are fucking awesome. Plus, they’re pretty much grown, so it’s not like he has to go to PTA meetings with his baby momma or anything. BUT— as a musician, he is always on the road, which is something I don’t think I could handle. This one thing is such a deal-breaker for me that it is as important as all of the good things I mentioned about him combined. Even though I crave my own space and freedom like it’s my energy source, I’m also extremely needy (I’m the worst, I know) and couldn’t handle that much distance.

CRITTER

Critter is the kind of guy who, in an apocalyptic situation, you could trust to take care of everything while you took a nap in the panic room. Or if a Taken-esque kidnapping were to happen, he would totally be a great Liam Neeson and not give up on finding me, ever. He’s a gentleman in the true sense of the word and has the best manners of all the guys on the show. While he’s sort of quiet on the show, real-life Critter is full of good stories and very funny. He has a quality about him that makes him impossible not to like. Physically, Critter is a universally perfect specimen— blonde with light eyes, tall, and sturdily built. His aspirations, though, don’t fit with mine: While I’m hoping to retire in a penthouse suite of a hotel and spend my old age on heroin, writing, and getting fat, Critter wants to live on a huge ranch (ugh, nature) engaging in torturous activities like fishing and getting drunk.

VAL

Val would be the worst to be married to, and not just because he has hit a woman because she was annoying him at CPK. He would definitely, one hundred percent cheat on me—and not in an open-relationship kind of way, but in a he-has-a-secret-Tinder-account kind of way. He once cat-fished a woman into flying across the country to come live with him, all the while telling her his name was Aaron. Come to think of it, do we even know if Val is his real name? He is a dangerous man.

DAVE

Dave is kind of the best man for me—if things were completely different. His personality is perfect. He is funny, intelligent, and relentlessly curious. When he gives the BFE (boyfriend experience), it’s magical: He is loving, attentive, and so much fun. At the same time, he is just as selfish as me, and he has so much going on that he’s not the kind of guy I’d feel like his happiness depended on my actions. I imagine ours would be the kind of relationship where we do our own shit during the day and then come together at night. Maybe I’m totally wrong. I’ve had sex with him before, so I know he’s good at it. I’d never be bored with him, because he likes to talk even more than I do. Also, I can’t decide whether I like Fat Dave or (relatively) Skinny Dave better—both are equally attractive in their own ways. His sense of style is probably the best on the show (homeless chic.) He is someone whose character judgments I can completely respect—just look at the people around him. When he says someone is horrible (which is often), I generally agree wholeheartedly. I also think I could (pretty easily) convince him into a three-way with a transsexual hooker. On the down side, he’s a sensitive artist and has totally fucked-up views on long-term relationships. He’s self-destructive. Also, Dave shits his pants suspiciously often for a full-grown adult—which I think is sort of a metaphor for his entire being.

But back to Big Bear and the team-building weekend: It was noon and we had all been awake for a couple of hours. Having stayed up late the previous night arguing about which was more gay (sucking dick or French kissing), conversation this morning had been kept to the bare minimum of “I made coffee” and “Thanks.” I was lying on the sofa, catching up on all of my social media feeds on my phone, when a text from Dave came in.

Wanna play a prank on everyone?

Because we are the same person, I knew where he was going with this. The previous night, Dave and I had slept in the same room. The ranch had enough rooms for everyone, but most were detached from the main house—in order to get to them, one had to walk outside, in the dark, up some creaking stairs, into separate cottages. The rooms in the main house were all already occupied by Mangchi members, and even though I was scared of the dark, even though I had never lived in a house, and even though I was the only girl there (I pulled this card only when desperate), no one wanted to trade with me—so Dave offered me his bed, and he slept on the sofa in the master suite. This is the kind of millionaire Dave is.

Let's tell everyone we fucked! I wrote back, making sure no one was close enough to me to see my phone.

I'm in Bobby's room, I already told him. He's so excited, he replied.

I should note here that Dave and I had sex when we first met. It had been a few years since I’d been in porn, and I’d been cast as the lead in a movie called PURE for the late David Aaron Clarke. It was my first big role, and I considered it to be my big break. Yoshi, an editor at the production company shooting PURE, knew that Dave was a fan of mine. He made the introduction, inviting Dave to the set. We exchanged numbers, and a few days later, we hung out and realized we were the same person. In a heated moment while watching The Human Centipede at my house, we had sex. We continued as fuck buddies, lost touch, became fuck buddies again, lost touch again, and became fuck buddies again. We did this a few times before the whole Facebook thing happened, he went off to rehab, and I married Toni. People often ask me why Dave and I never progressed past fuck buddies; I blame this entirely on Dave. He was (and continues to be) antirelationship. I think when he meets the right girl, he could be an amazing boyfriend.

I went back up to the master bedroom and texted Dave again.

Lemme know when you wanna record, I'm going back upstairs to get some writing done.

A few hours later, a group message came through to my phone from Dave’s manager saying that they were ready to start the show. We all met in the living room, where Bobby was smiling like an excited child. He was sitting next to Dave, and when I walked by, he looked at me.

“Oh, are you sitting there?” I asked awkwardly.

“No, you sit next to Dave,” Bobby got up.

I gave Bobby a “don’t be weird” look and sat on the sofa across from them.

What proceeded was an hour of Dave and me lying.

“We dry-humped.”

“Okay, well, we may as well say it then—we had sex.”

“I came inside of her.”

“What? I thought you said you didn’t.”

“I told her to call me Toni.”

“No comment.”

At the end of the episode, we revealed that we had been playing a joke on everyone; we read the text messages from earlier that morning, everyone had a good laugh, and we went on a hike and complained the entire time that we were on a hike. When the episode aired, Dave and I watched the comments roll in giddily— would people fall for it? Would they be just as excited as the rest of the cast had been when we revealed it was all a joke?

The answers were yes and no. Everyone did fall for it. The problem was, half the people didn’t listen until the end, so they just continued on with their lives believing it to be a true story. The other half thought we were just lying about lying, and assumed that we really had fucked.

To this day, I’m asked at least once a week whether or not I was unfaithful to Toni, whether Dave and I really did fuck in Big Bear, and whether or not we are currently engaging in an affair. It’s a tired subject, and it’s become one of those things where I’m telling the truth, but feel the guilt of being dishonest. Nobody seems to believe me, and I wonder sometimes if the fun of the prank was worth being labeled a liar.

The answer is probably yes. But I should have known; Mercury in retrograde was not a good time for a prank.