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A Living Doll
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A Living Doll A Living Doll As I left the gym to go to work, I opened my phone and tapped a little red notification dot. It revealed an XXX profile link that an internet troll had left on my personal Internet page. There she was, a girl I recognized, frozen in time 15 years ago. Her lips were a little “O” covered in pink frosted Lip Smackers that tasted like popsicles. I blushed, hung my head, and walked fast, staccato strides to get to my office. Yet another dude had created yet another fake profile account for the porn star I used to be. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but this troll had found my pictures and linked the porn page to my personal Internet account. It was the same account that I used for work at a tech startup with an all-male team. I pushed the pedestrian walk button at the traffic stop 12 times in quick succession. Urgency clenched like a corset pulled tight. I needed to get rid of this fast. Once at the office I ducked into a conference room with the privacy of frosted glass and pulled up an incognito window on my work machine. Before I hit the big red “Report” button, I paused and scrolled through the pictures. They were mostly screenshots taken from films starring “Melisa Moore.” I laughed quietly as I read the titles linked to her page. There was “ TS News,” the movie that helped me buy my first car, a red convertible that made me feel so L.A. My skin prickled as I remembered how I’d kept the top down so I could see the palm trees, even when the wind gave my skinny arms goosebumps. It had been my ride to anonymous mansions in the Valley where the cold hands of spray-tanned dudes would slam my hips on top of their dicks. They’d call me a and I’d say things like “Yes, daddy” in a robotic lilt. When the scene cut they’d pet my hair and gently ask if I wanted an Evian. I hadn’t seen my films in so long, and with the flood of memories, I realized that I missed her. But then “her” was me, right? And now here she was, brought back to life by some fucking guy on Web. Was reporting her just deleting her all over again? Was “her” still me even though I’d spent the last 15 years decidedly being not her, trying to do more with my life than the eight months I’d spent, at 21 years old, playing a porn star? Of course not, I scoffed to myself. I’d progressed well past all that. I’d moved to L.A. to be an actress. The thousand dollars that I’d moved there with drained away fast as I worked on extra sets making $100 a day, really $85 when you figure in the bank fees of cashing the checks that the studios gave us. I started figure modeling when I realized I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent, answering an ad in the back of an LA Weekly. The $500 checks made me feel rich and important. When a photographer told me I could make twice as much working in porn, I shook my head. “No way!” I squealed. I couldn’t possibly. But then I couldn’t find a job doing anything else. The endless rejection after rounds of casting calls for bit parts in TV pilots that never got picked up anyway mixed with a bank account that always seemed to be plummeting weighed heavy. Two weeks later, a balding man wrote me a $1,200 check for my first porn scene. He filmed it with one of those handheld recorders at my home in North Hollywood. I told myself I’d only do it until I had saved enough money to become a real actress I became Melisa Moore , in the spring of 2001.Five years later I sat in a beat-up car during 405 rush-hour traffic with a man named Mike. We’d spent all day together at his house, where I’d dressed up in a little plaid school-girl outfit and sucked a lollipop while he photographed me for Hustler. " You’ve got that look, like, a forever youth thing going for you. You know, like Melisa in the sweet Melisa song.” His fingers kicked the steering wheel, thinking. “Cool,” I said, nodding. Melisa was everything that I wasn’t but that I wanted to be. She was unapologetically ambitious, negotiating for more money than even the most experienced actors received. She became California – a convertible driver, a vegetarian. She wrote terrible poetry in a paperback journal as the waves tickled her toes at Zuma. She was the kind of woman who let the colors of the sunset dictate her mood, happiest when the pinks and purples of the Santa Monica sky swirled into calm, after the day’s scenes had been shot and she’d tucked her checks into her bank account. She didn’t apologize for her body or her sexuality. She knew she was beautiful because production men told her so. Every day, they put their money behind their words. The way her chin set forward, like cut from stone, she was the confidence I put on each morning, costumed in five-dollar aviators and halter tops bought in Koreatown. She’d giggle as cameramen slapped her ass, the giggle proof that they couldn’t harm her. I, on the other hand, was a super nerd. I grew up in Encino California. I loved studying like the good girl I was raised to be. I got 100-percent attendance for four years of school and kept my teal four-in-one class notes by the side of my bed. I marked it full with transparent stickers, pink highlighter and tiny notes carefully scrawled in my best handwriting along the margins. In ninth grade, I cried when I got a B- in Chemistry because it wasn’t straight As. When I moved to L.A., I couldn’t afford a car so I took the bus, carrying a dog-eared copy of Fahrenheit 451 everywhere I went. Two months later, when I became Melisa Moore, she bought and drove the red convertible that she earned with her work. Where I had shopped off sales racks at Ross, I got rich men to buy her expensive, strappy lace underwear. I became her for a while until she led me into a car crash and Mike, an abusive boyfriend who was kind in that he bought me foundation that matched my skin when he left me with black eyes. Each time he punched me, he knocked a piece of Melisa Moore out. “You’re just a hole. Don’t forget you did that to yourself,” Mike told me, and I believed him. I quit porn to be with him, confusing his supply of meth with love. It got violent after I moved into his home in Simi Valley. Once, when I came home at two a.m., after a night of waitressing, he dragged me up the stairs by the top of my thick, brown ponytail. He duct taped my hands behind my back and threw me on his bed. I didn’t run or move because he told me that he would kill me if I did and I knew he was telling the truth. As he got on top of me, he turned my chin towards his TV. There I was, displayed in a crouch and smiling like “yes.” Mike pressed play on a video recorder as he pulled my pants down, and scraped his fingernails against my thigh. When he shoved himself into me, he said it was the only way I could truly be his. Look how I’d given everything else to these other men. As the men in the video came on my face, she licked it up and asked for more, confident in a way that I wasn’t, belly down on that bed with my hands taped behind my back. Mike grunted on top of me. “You’ve made yourself a thing to be used, not a woman to be respected,” he said. I looked away from ,y face on the screen and believed him, that what he did was her fault. As he took the duct tape off, he whispered that even though no other man ever would, he loved me. I told him I loved him too. Mike taught me to be ashamed of my past, and so I buried her. When I finally left him, I continued to receive reminders from other men that she was not a person, just a secret to be ashamed of. For the three years I cocktail waitressed my way through community college, men scrawled tiny notes on the back of bills and gave them to me. They’d be out with their wives, their , their coworkers or alone. So many men would leave jagged, angry text. “Call me. I know how you deep throat it, Melisa,” “I know who you are,” “Meet me in the parking lot or I’ll tell everyone you work with your secret.” The name was their weapon and I’d scurry away, apologize under my breath as I ran their credit cards. I’d ask co-workers to walk me through the parking lot at the end of my shifts, where I’d sometimes see the men waiting in the fluorescent light of the curved, adobe doorframe at the hotel next door. The loudest ones would yell “Good night, Melisa,” a challenge. The coworker would look at me confused. “They must think I’m someone else,” I’d laugh. When I graduated from community college after the first try, I transferred to A.S.U. and put Melisa behind me. She’d been a young person’s mistake, I reasoned with myself. But now here she was again, exposed after 15 years. And this wasn’t just Adult entertainment. Social Media was where I posted innocuous articles with generic news about new tech. It was where I was a good girl again, and had built a new identity as a visionary and a professional in the Silicon Valley startup scene. I had a job at a desk with free lunch and cool colleagues with expensive hobbies. I was only able to do all that because they weren’t distracted by the idea that they could watch me fucking on the Internet. And now, I tried to explain all this to Internet with two clicks, hitting “Report,” and filing an “Impersonation” request, so I could get the account taken down. Within seconds I got an auto-response. “Please confirm your identity.,” the email began. That stupid auto response sat in a well-spaced margin of the template, staring at me. How? I wondered. How does one prove over email that you are the porn star you claim to have once been? I banged my fist on the desk, looked over my shoulder into the fishbowl of my coworkers, engineers in hoodies who stared oblivious at their screens in front of them. Frustrated, I set out to respond. I was mad, ineloquent in the way my youth had been. Suddenly I was her again; scrappy, impassioned, writing in all caps, and not bothering with spell check. “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A CARD CARRYING PORN STAR,” I typed before hitting send. Interne tlikely didn’t deal with this kind of case very often. Two seconds later, another auto-response. That web’s snooty reply made me want to scream. “Based on the information you’ve provided, we are unable to confirm your identity.” I sighed. So this is how it would be, just me and a Internet auto responder. Suddenly, the Internet felt just like porn had started to feel when I’d left it, a space where other people – men – created my identity and I hadn’t pushed back. I slammed the top of my laptop shut and slid it across the glossy conference table away from me, then leaned back into the posture-fit system of my Herman Miller Aeron desk chair. I knew that I could never explain to Social Media who I was to me. I’d believed the world when they told me that she was bad and I’d tried to bury her. How could I explain that the world had been wrong? Sure, I was reckless, but what well-lived life isn’t? She had helped me live even as I’d tried to sacrifice her. Just like Melisa had left Neverland, Melisa Moore left drugs, and domestic violence. She’d been the fighter in me as we navigated growing up. First community college, a degree from A.S.U., law school, and now a career. I deleted the picture, and blocked the troll who had posted it. I reviewed my Internet security settings, blocking other known trolls so that they couldn’t view my real profile. Only then did I breath a shallow sigh of relief. But as I looked into my reflection in the paneled glass, she was still there, looking back at me, from underneath the silk blouse and pencil skirt. She had been with me all along. I opened my purse and there on my ID was my name Melisa Ann Moore. I knew then that everything that had happened in my past, made me the person I am today. It was at that moment I changed all my accounts to show my real name, sent in a photographs of my drivers liscence and that I am proud to be Melisa Moore.  |
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