He Needed the Money
On the day Sergio Ristie opened his copy of the entertainment trade publication Variety and saw Darren James' photo, he remembers, "I couldn't believe my eyes."
A personal trainer, Ristie recalled James clearly from the Hollywood boxing gym where Ristie often took clients for workouts — the slight, clean-cut guy who worked nights at the counter.
"It was 1998, '99, something like that," he said. "Not many people come in late at night, and we started talking. He'd just gotten a job there, and he said he also did pornos. I said, 'Why're you in that business?' And he said he needed the money — but he also said it worried him because AIDS was floating around."
Those who know James, from acquaintances to close family members, describe an amiable, passive man whose character was far more complex than the drug-addled drifters whom mainstream America typically associates with porn.
"He's just one of the greatest people you will ever know in the whole, wide world," said Brian Edwards, a nephew in Ohio who regards James as his "favorite uncle." Born in 1964 in Detroit, James, the nephew said, had been raised by his divorced mother in the Herman Gardens housing project, the youngest of six children.
"He had a hard life, one of the hardest lives you can imagine," he said, adding that James "would work out in the gym — karate, taekwondo — just in the gym all the time, pushin' it out, pushin' it out. He'd say that holding things inside could cause you to take it out on people, could make you just want to explode."
To escape Detroit, relatives said, he joined the Navy, traveling through Asia, eventually ending up in Ventura County at Port Hueneme.
Afterward, he lived for a while in nearby Oxnard, and in 1992 made a run at becoming a police officer, according to Steve Adams, a former Oxnard police detective. James later told his nephew that physical problems prevented him from making the cut.
It was while he was living in Oxnard, his Los Angeles friends said, that he began showing up in the offices of adult film industry casting agents.
Mickey Blank, a veteran manufacturer and distributor of porn in Orange County, remembers hiring him through an older amateur porn actress who worked the swingers circuit: "He wouldn't do gay or she-male, but he was pretty game otherwise," Blank said.
"Wesley B," a director for the adult film company West Coast Productions, recalls meeting James in 1996 or 1997 in the waiting room of World Modeling, a Sherman Oaks agency that works with adult-film makers, and hiring him to do a 30-minute oral sex scene for $100.
In L.A., however, James struggled — producers say they are rarely at a loss for young male freelancers hoping to get paid for having sex with shapely women. For a heterosexual scene, the man's pay will often be half of the woman's.
"Big bald black guy, little bitty white girl — that's where the money is for black male [porn] performers," said Alexander DeVoe, a friend and producer-director. "Darren didn't fit the stereotype, so he had to make his reputation on the fact that he was a consistent and reliable performer."
James didn't shoot drugs, mistreat women or waste time, said his directors, but his assignments were frequently scenes most other men would turn down. By 1999, friends said, he was frustrated and ready to quit the business. Then in 2000, his brother died in Detroit, and he went home.
He tried to stay, looking for work as a bouncer or personal trainer, and eventually becoming a hospital aide. But "the past was still there for him," said the nephew, and after a few months, it drove James back to L.A.
A Contentious Family
Roxx grew up in a suburban French-speaking middle-class home, the younger of two daughters. Her father worked frequently out of town, and her parents' marriage was contentious, she says.
"My parents were always fighting," she says. "Emotionally, I had the worst childhood."
By 14, Roxx was experimenting with pot, LSD and other drugs. She stayed away from home, got falling-down drunk in her classrooms, was truant from one school after another. Eventually, she was arrested on drug charges and sent to a restrictive, government-run youth protection center for troubled adolescents.
"I learned a whole bunch of stuff about stripping, stealing cars, selling drugs, you know?" says Roxx, who has yet to finish high school. "I learned that there was a lot of bad people on this Earth."
When Roxx was 16, her parents divorced. Neither of them, she recalls, felt ready to take her home.
Eventually, her mother helped her get an apartment in Laval, and Roxx paid the rent with earnings from strip clubs in the small French-speaking towns nearby. She learned "how to get the money out of the pocket" and soon moved to clubs in downtown Montreal.
But they had limitations — get too physical with a client and they'd fire you. A girl at a subway stop introduced her to a man who paid petite teenage girls $2,000 to have sex. After three visits Roxx was preparing to start her own escort service. She was 18.
By 2000, the lifestyle had landed her in the hospital for depression. She tried other jobs, tried living with her parents, but the money in the sex industry drew her like no other. By early 2003, Roxx had synthesized a goal: pornography.
She put an ad on a website where nude models, strippers and porn wannabes post their photos and resumes. A mutual acquaintance introduced Roxx to Lefebvre, a freelance photographer and hockey player who moonlighted as a driver and security guard to the local strippers. Lefebvre, who is 12 years older than Roxx, also had some of his own contacts in Montreal's porn industry.
She paid $900 toward his parking tickets and, in exchange, he shot some portfolio photos. Within a few weeks, Roxx had moved in with Lefebvre. It was around this time that she suffered the emotional breakdown; the bed fire put her in the hospital for six more weeks.
When she got out that time, she says, she had a new plan: Earn enough to leave Montreal.
Lefebvre says he was trying to help when he set up an interview with Daniel Perreault, owner of the well-established Montreal talent agency Eromodel Group.
Lefebvre also booked Roxx's first video shoot for MSN Productions, a Montreal-based company that operates several porn websites. On Jan. 10, 2004, she performed in two sex scenes for two websites, earning $950.
Today, Lefebvre has mixed feelings about connecting his "muse" to the world of adult film. On one hand he believes that "if I had been strong enough, probably she would have never done porn." On the other, he says, he couldn't have stopped her if he had wanted to.
"If she decides that's good for her," he said, "it's good for her."
'Hey, You the Man'
Back in L.A., James returned to adult films. As his nephew Edwards saw it, "he hadn't found much that was good in his life, but it was like, 'Hey, you the man' at this."
The market was also finally beginning to break in James' favor. "Companies have always had their interracial lines," DeVoe said, "but over the last two, three years, there's been a slow progression that all of a sudden has become an explosion of demand."
Directors who worked with James estimated that, by this year, he was making $400 to $600 a scene and doing five scenes or more a week. He had two cars and a modest two-bedroom apartment where he lived alone in the Valley. He had a fish tank and space for the collection of model remote-controlled airplanes he flew on weekends.
Eventually, friends said, he was offered a contract by "T.T. Boy," a porn star turned producer, finally guaranteeing him a steady paycheck. He was quickly dispatched to far-flung locations with "Mark Anthony," another contract performer who had moved into directing.
The work, as usual, was mostly condom-less, and competing directors questioned the AIDS testing in Brazil, where he told them he'd be filming. James, however, became "a health fanatic," said Lee Goodwin, a friend and director: "He'd get tested every couple of weeks."
Roxx, too, was learning the risk-reward equation. Scenes without condoms, her agent Perreault told her, could pay twice as much as scenes with them. And if she "wasn't going to go to 100%" of her potential, it was a waste of time.
Perreault also told her that two L.A. companies — Anthony's crew and Devils Productions — were headed to Montreal, and they weren't interested in "straight" sex. Roxx didn't hesitate. She cast off her restrictions, and Perreault booked a condom-free anal sex scene with Darren James for her. She would make $1,000 for a day's work.
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