Chapter 131

It took only a single phone call to the hotel room and Ekaterina packed a bag and headed downstairs to meet the group. She was happy to see Adam again and she was comfortable in Anya's presence.

Ekaterina was not especially familiar with American porn but she had taken time to study up on the people she had met earlier in the week. She had been amazed at how sweet Judy Jackem and Michelle Foxx had been. They hadn't reacted with revulsion when the saw the things she had done. Most people who knew about her jobs gave her a look of pity or a look of disgust.

Judy had given a simple nod of understanding – and Michelle had offered a way out.

Ekaterina took the telephone numbers that Michelle had offered. She had been lied to so many times in her young life so she viewed most people with distrust. She had fully expected that Five Friends Casting and Subarctic Enterprises – whatever that was – would wash their hands of her as soon as they got the chance. Most people did.

It wasn't until Anya came back from her shoot that same evening that Ekaterina thought perhaps it must just be real. She called the consulate the next morning and visited soon afterward. It took only two phone calls – one to the U.S. State Department and the other to Five Friends Casting – to extend her work visa for a full six months instead of two weeks. The consulate, bless their hearts, listed her occupation as 'actress' and listed her reason for staying in the U.S. as 'seeking educational opportunities not available in Russia'.

That gave her time to see if she could find a better way of life in the United States. She had spent a great deal of time on a borrowed computer at the hotel. She had tried to find out all she could about Five Friends Casting, which was a lot easier to find than Subarctic Enterprises. The only hits for Subarctic on Google came back with some sort of computer program that Ekaterina really didn't understand. She knew her way around a computer but her English wasn't good enough for her to translate and comprehend some of the technical terms the articles used.

Ekaterina had put off calling her home agency to discuss a release from her contract. Her biggest fear was that the agency would insist she reimburse them for the trip to Los Angeles – something she wouldn't be able to do – or that they would insist she return to fulfill the remaining months she owed to them.

The phone call to Vaclav Nagy went better than Ekaterina had a right to hope. He simply told her that he had discussed the issue with Five Friends Casting and he was willing to release her from her contract after her Sunday shoot if she wanted to stay in Los Angeles. He also offered to have movers box up her apartment and move her items into storage at the agency so she wouldn't risk losing what few belongings she had accumulated.

She was stunned at the offer and told him she would be willing to work for Budapest Central Casting though the remainder of the trip. Mr. Nagy simply replied she was welcome to stay on the tour if she wished but it wasn't necessary.

Ekaterina decided she should probably wait until after she had a chance to discuss the situation thoroughly with Derrick and Michelle – she still thought of them by their performer names because she had never been formally introduced to them - before she committed to anything. If she did stay in Los Angeles, she would be homeless pretty quickly if they didn't offer their assistance.

But she thought it was a very good sign that Anya had called and asked her to join the group for a couple of days to get to know everyone. For the first time in her life, Ekaterina felt the future might just hold promise.

In an industry as transient as porn, where workers come and go sometimes without staying a month or even a week, those who have worked together for years often find their paths crossing. It is also true that in an industry with so many differing personalities, those with similar personalities sometimes form working relationships with companies whose corporate ethics went along the same lines.

In that manner, the adult industry is no different from many places.

It was these two simple facts that led Sadie Strutt, Harmony Wakefield, Tony Armani and Lance Thruster to meet in the waiting room at RapidFire Video. Sadie and Harmony had been brought in as possible replacements for some European who had cancelled that weekend and Tony and Lance were there begging for work.

The four performers had worked together in the past. That is to say that each of the four had worked individually with the others. Although there was no trust between them, there were probably as close to being friends as anyone in the business could be.

It didn't take long for the conversation to turn to recent events. Sadie and Harmony knew of the recent uprising from the male talent – an uprising that had been quelled as quickly and as fiercely as the 'Prague Spring'. The men had wound up costing the major houses tens of thousands of dollars and that wasn't taken lightly.

The strike had also forced some of the bigger studios – such as RapidFire – to completely alter their shooting schedule. RapidFire was set to do a feature called 'Foreign Trade' but that had to be scrapped when the lead actress, Anya Kovec, had decided to cast her own male counterpart. Now the company was embroiled in potential litigation over how the cancellation was handled and the European casting agency had taken it upon themselves to announce to the world why the shoot was dropped.

Studios and their executives were used to calling the shots. It's why they held so much financial interest in the casting agencies. It gave them flexibility to cast the starlets in any role they saw fit and to seek – and get – certain incentives for using a particular actress.

The strike had upset the apple cart, although very few of the studios understood the real rationale behind it. That had been the case until Harmony, Sadie, Lance and Tony started talking outside RapidFire's casting director's office.

Tony and Lance had been left to stew for more than 45 minutes when Sadie arrived. It had grown to an hour when Harmony walked in.

Neither Tony nor Lance saw their own hand in what had befallen them. They saw only a conspiracy among Derrick Driller and the smaller houses to keep them from working. It was the nature of such people to minimize their own roles when things turned bad. Introspection was foreign to the four sitting at RapidFire.

Tony and Lance were pissed off that no one – not a single person – in the business was willing to even speak to them, let alone hire them. Sadie was pissed off that Adam Walters had gotten in the last word in their argument and then dropped the class the next day. She had wasted an entire day thinking up what she was going to say. Harmony was pissed off that a list of actresses with outside business interests (such as escorting and prostitution) was making its way around. Several men who worked with Harmony had demanded condoms. It was personally embarrassing to Harmony.

It didn't take the foursome long to find a common element in all their frustration – Derrick Driller, a person that the ownership and leadership of RapidFire had no reason to love either, particularly after the unflattering publicity RapidFire and its contemporaries had received the previous mornings in the 'Los Angeles Chronicle'.

"I'd never heard of the guy," Rhett Wilson, casting director for RapidFire Video, said to the group in front of him with a shrug. "Then I get a call from that chick who is pimping those Euro-sluts. She said the big dog there, that Olympic bitch, was invoking a clause in her contract to let her name her own co-star. So I said, fuck it, let's just cancel the scene. I mean, this was payback to Rod Rammer for stepping up a few months ago. He wanted to do a scene with the twat so I booked it. Next thing I know, we're being served papers alleging breach of contract. The owners are pissed as hell at me because they named RapidFire as an entity but also they named the individual owners."

"I'm sure that prick Driller had a hand in getting that filed," Rick Delco (aka Tony Armani) said.

"He actually threatened me outside of Daystar," Perry Gordon (aka Lance Thruster) added. The remark drew a sharp look from Tony, who wanted no one to remind RapidFire of the failed attempt to boycott certain studios. Rhett passed it off without a comment.

"He is telling everyone I'm a whore," Harmony, whose real name was Tina Curry, put forth. "He has a list he's circulating everywhere. I think he even gave it to the AMS people to warn performers who might work with me."

"Then let's get rid of the fucker," Rhett said simply. It was how the industry handled troublemakers – just like it would handle Tony and Lance. Your work dried up and rumors started to pop up about why. It could be a rumor of AIDS or maybe that you preferred gay work.

"He's got someone bankrolling him," Hannah St. Cloud (or Sadie Strutt) offered. "He told me that's how that feature is getting done. He is financing it himself."

"That's his?" Rhett asked. "Who is the money man? It can't be Daystar or Dazzle. They're strictly small time. Judy Jackem can't afford rent half the time. It's not her. If we find out who is backing him, we can expose them. Believe me, I learned this week that the pricks with the big bucks do not like to be equated to fuck flicks."

"He didn't say who it was," Hannah admitted. "He just said he financed it himself. It might be his money."

Rick rolled his eyes.

"He drives a beat-up piece of shit car," Rick said. "I seen it when he first came to the business. Plus Frank Meeks, you know, the guy who used to work for Judy told me he got into the business because he needed dough. It ain't his money."

"So who?" Perry asked. "Maybe one of those bitches?"

"Please," Tina said. "I've heard all about Ashley Malibu and Sahara Rain. Those girls are strictly small-time."

Rhett nodded his agreement. They would never work for RapidFire so, to him, they were small-time.

"But he's got Cassie Charms and Rita Looker, too," Hannah offered. "I saw that on their profiles at PornLife. I saw Rita hanging out with him on campus."

"Campus?" Rhett asked.

"USC," Hannah clarified. "Sorry, I thought you knew that's how I know him. We have class together. Well, we did."

"So we out him on campus," Tina said.

"He's a guy," Rick pointed out. "It won't work. Sure, he might not get to date some cute coed but it's not like he would get booted."

"That shit don't work no more," Perry said with a nod. "Hell, some jobs won't even can a guy for doing porn."

Perry knew that firsthand because he had found out a guy he didn't like was working at an ad agency. He had, anonymously of course, alerted the CEO to the guy's past. The guy was still working there, much to Perry's disappointment.

"What about the girls he works with?" Rhett said. "You said you saw Rita on campus. We could let everyone know what she does and get to him that way."

Hannah was growing increasingly uncomfortable with this line of thinking. She had the distinct impression that Derrick Driller would embark on a 'scorched earth' policy if someone went after anyone he was close to. RapidFire was immune but she wasn't. If someone outed Rita Looker at USC, it wasn't a far stretch for Derrick Driller to start naming others he knew on campus that worked in the same industry.

"I think we should try to find out who is behind the money first," Hannah offered. "It would be a lot easier to convince whoever it is to pull out than it would be to let people know where Rita Looker goes to school. Plus, there is no way to know that anyone will even care."

Rhett nodded his slight agreement, then called the meeting to a close.

"Well, thanks for coming in," he said. "Harmony, Sadie, we're going a different direction for the feature. Tony, Lance, we still have nothing for you. We'll call you if something comes up."

"I love your accent!" Leslie told Ekaterina, who blushed slightly. Unlike Anya, whose diction was almost flawless – except for the fact she didn't use contractions – Ekaterina had an inflection that was common to native Russian speakers when they used English. She often dropped articles and personal pronouns from sentence construction, giving the words a choppy sound. Verb tenses were completely foreign to her.

"I like yours, too," Ekaterina said. Leslie still had a distinctive Southern dialect. She was almost impossible to understand when she got excited or started to speak fast – except for Adam, who was used to the accent, having grown up only a hundred miles from Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Anya spoke almost like an upper-crust socialite. Her pronunciation was precise and she had an excellent vocabulary for someone who wasn't a native speaker. She had mentioned that part of her training at the Slovakian Olympic Center was in languages. She spoke Russian, French, Spanish and English like a native. She could also manage a short conversation in Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese.