Tera Patrick - Sinner Takes All

At our lunch meeting I basically told my manager Sam, “Look, I’ve been acting the way I’m acting because I’m not happy and I want a break.” She agreed that I needed a break. I was clearly miserable with my life, my relationship, and my work, and I was drinking way too much. It was obvious that I needed some time off to get my shit together. And I started to not enjoy the sex as much as I used to. It became harder to orgasm, because I was just unhappy in my contract and stressed out. And that’s no fun. That’s why I got into porn in the first place.

My plan was this: Take a hiatus from porn. Get sober. Figure out why I didn’t have a lot of money and where my money was going. And let the fog I was in lift a bit to get some clarity. I had no idea what I was going to do beyond that, but I knew I wanted to have a more normal life. I knew I needed to work on my self-esteem and work on myself, but I just didn’t know how.

As they say, timing is everything. I believe I met Evan at the perfect time in my life, but it almost didn’t happen that way. In the late ’90s my best friend was a Swedish lady named Anneli Adolfsson. She came to America when she was twenty years old to be a rock-and-roll and porn photographer. And she became very successful in her field. One of the first rock stars she ever photographed was Evan Seinfeld, lead singer and bassist of the hardcore rock band Biohazard. Evan also would play a badass biker on HBO’s prison drama Oz.

Anneli and Evan had known each other for a long time, and she used to hang out with the band and a lot of the other hardcore bands that Evan was friends with. They basically ran in the same rock-and-roll circle.

One day, she and I were having a fun chick day in good old Sherman Oaks. We were getting our nails done, having lunch, and gossiping as girls do. Halfway through our lunch, she said to me, “I want to introduce you to this guy Evan Seinfeld, and I want to shoot you for his band’s album cover.”

I asked her, “Who are we talking about? What band is he in?”

“Biohazard. They’re an awesome hardcore band,” she said.

“Who the fuck is Biohazard?” I was such a snob about it. “Let me know when I can be on a Metallica album cover.” I was a little too cool for school about the whole thing. When I was fourteen I was hanging out at a club in Japan with Guns N’ Roses, and now she wanted me to do some photo shoot with a band I’d never heard of? No thanks.

I totally dismissed it, and didn’t even bother to lock the name, Evan Seinfeld, in my mind.

Fast-forward to the year 2002 when I was at the tail end of dating Erik. I would look into Erik’s eyes and just not see any sparkle, and certainly not see any love for me. He never told me I was pretty, he never wined and dined me, and he never made me feel good about myself. There was no purpose to it.

One Sunday night, Erik and I were hanging out at his place, watching HBO’s Oz. I’d never seen it before. I looked up at the TV screen and I saw a naked, tattooed man run across the screen with his penis swinging in all its glory. This naked man was so hot and he had this strong, powerful voice. He really struck me because he had looked so bad, so strong and dangerous. He was exactly what I had always wanted in a man. He was totally unlike any guy I had ever dated before, and he was the complete opposite of the guy sitting on the couch next to me. I thought I was getting a tattooed badass when I met Erik, but he was not the real deal. In this naked man on the screen, though, I saw a nice guy with a tough-guy exterior. I instantly thought to myself, “That dark figure who’s running across the screen with a big wiener is going to be my husband someday.”

My relationship with Erik was over at that moment.

Erik was also excited by the sight of this man, but for a different reason. They knew each other.

“Hey, Tera. Look, it’s my boy Evan!”

“Oh, really. Evan who?”

“Evan Seinfeld. He’s from the band Biohazard.”

It still didn’t click in my head that my photographer friend Anneli tried to get us together a few years earlier. But I was intrigued. I kept the name Evan Seinfeld in my head and I started calling around to everyone I knew to see if anyone knew how I could get in touch with this man. It became this “Where’s Waldo?” kind of search where everyone seemed to know who he was, but couldn’t give me any real leads on how to get in touch with him. Remember, this was before the days of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, where everyone is easy to find at the click of a mouse.

So, I called my friend Paul who worked in the television business. I figured since he worked in the TV industry, maybe he could help me out. He said, “Are you kidding me? You want to meet that guy Evan Seinfeld from Oz?”

“Yeah, I’m really interested in meeting him. He’s really hot,” I replied. Paul clearly wasn’t happy. He said, “I don’t want you to meet Evan Seinfeld. He would be bad for you. He would make you his cock puppet.” But that just piqued my interest even more. If this hot, tattooed, strong-looking man with the big dick wanted to make me his cock puppet, that would be fine with me!

Paul suggested I call up HBO to try to get ahold of Evan. He gave me a number to call, and I did. But I didn’t get anywhere. I was transferred from department to department until someone finally spoke to me.

“Don’t hang up!” I screamed, probably sounding crazy and desperate.

“I’m looking for one of your actors,” I told the lady on the phone.

“Are you a reporter?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, who are you with?”

“No one. It’s a personal call.”

Silence.

“His name is Evan Seinfeld and he’s on Oz and I know this may sound strange, but I’d like to give you my name and number so you can pass it along to him.”

More silence.

I had been put on hold and transferred so many times that I just sat there and waited, thinking she was actually helping me out. A minute went by and I was like, “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

She had hung up on me.

A few days later I was chatting with my friend Anneli, still not making the connection that she had already tried to introduce me to Evan. I said to her, “Hey, Anneli, you know a lot of musician types. Do you know this guy Evan Seinfeld from Biohazard?” By that time I had searched for Evan on the Internet to find out more about him. “I saw him on Oz and he’s super hot and I’m really interested in him.”

And then there was yet more silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, I heard, “Ahem. I tried to introduce you to him years ago.”

“Oh my God! That’s the guy you wanted me to do a photo shoot with?!”

“Yeah, yeah. See how well I know your type?”

But then she added, “Careful, Tera. I know I tried to set you two up, but he does have a reputation with the ladies.”

“Well, I still want to meet him. He looks really good naked,” I replied.

She told me, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll call him and I’ll give him your number, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

What I didn’t know at the time was that she called him up immediately after our conversation and told him the following: “My best friend Tera wants to meet you. She’s a good girl and if you screw her over, I’ll totally kill you.” He was like, “Tera who?” So she made him get online and Google my name and he did. Then he said to her, “What is wrong with this girl? She’s gorgeous. She wants to go out with me?”

She gave Evan my number and a few days later he called. It was late in the afternoon and I picked up the phone and I heard his voice, “Hi, this is Evan. Is this Tera?”