She nods and tells a story of a man who showed up at one of her dance gigs. He
was carrying a tuxedo, so she asked him why. He told her that he'd lied to his
wife and pretended to be on his way to a wedding, then slipped off to a strip
club.
"There's a lot of couples out there that have to lie and sneak around," she
says. "I'm really lucky because I have a husband who's very understanding.
People may think we're completely whacked out because of what we do, but yet we
have trust and understanding. That's what's important."
Together, they make an extremely eye-catching couple. She's tall, dark-haired
and curvaceous, with a striking beauty that makes her stand out even in a crowd
of porn actors. He's compact, bald and has a warm smile that belies his
otherwise threatening appearance.
A child model
Before she became Tera Patrick, she was Linda Hopkins, who did some modeling as
a child, went to nursing school in Idaho and worked as an emergency medical
technician. She moved out to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s and cycled through
jobs, never really finding one she liked. She got into nude modeling, which led
to shoots for Hustler and Penthouse. Then soft-core porn. Then hard-core. She
didn't find it to be that much different.
"Porn is really funny," she says. "To this day, I don't really know why I did
it at first. I had good jobs and made good money from them."
All the while, he was touring the world with the rap-influenced metal band
Biohazard and testing his acting chops as the evil biker Jaz Hoyt in HBO's
prison drama "Oz." Midway through 2001, a photographer friend told him of this
porn actress named Tera he had to meet.
"I was like, `I don't know who Tera Patrick is. I've been living on a tour bus
or a prison set for the last 15 years,"' he said. "Sure enough, I looked her up
on the Internet and I was like, `Wow, that girl's (freakin') beautiful. What's
the hook? There's gotta be something wrong with her. She's got to be crazy,
hooked on drugs, broke, needy or something."
But she wasn't. Their schedules didn't mesh, so in a very old-fashioned way,
they started courting over the phone. For three months, they got to know each
other. He thought she was classy. She thought he was romantic.
"We laugh about what we'd do if we weren't like this - he would pump gas and I
would work at the grocery store and we would still love each other," Patrick
said.
"I knew right away. We were together for a week and I knew. He proposed a month
later."
Part
VI: Porn and the law |
Part VIII: Porn in the mainstream
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