Tera Patrick - Sinner Takes All

I also love being a stepmother to Sammy, who was just six years old when I met Evan. He’s fifteen years old now. Sammy is such a good kid, and I took to him immediately. He called me “Twear” when we first met, and he still says that today. Between 2003 and 2008, Evan and I were bicoastal, commuting back and forth from Los Angeles to New York to see Sammy on weekends. (Evan had partial custody—Elena had him weekdays and Evan had him weekends.) It was quite the commute for a weekend because not only did we fly for six hours cross-country, we also had to fight rush-hour Friday traffic in New York to get from our place to where Sammy lived with his mother. But I couldn’t wait to do it each time.

I’d make him breakfast every morning and we’d watch SpongeBob SquarePants marathons when he was a kid and play video games together as he got older. I’d take him shopping at the mall, teach him how to spike his hair with gel, and just hang out and chill. When I appeared in the game Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood and became a special producer for Saints Row 2, I scored big points with him because it was something he could show off to his friends. He even got to test drive Saints Row 2 a few months before it was released and was thrilled about that. Once he got older, we’d fly him to L.A. for weekends, and he once told us that he doesn’t tell his friends about his jet-set lifestyle because they wouldn’t believe him.

TERA’S TAT-ALOGUE:

I have five tattoos: a sacred heart on my ankle, an arm sleeve, a star on the inside of each wrist, and Hello Kitty on the back of my neck.

I got my first tattoo on my eighteenth birthday, in Idaho. I only had $65 to spend, so I got a small fuchsia rose on my right ankle. By 2002, it had started to fade, so I had it covered up with a sacred heart with a crown on top that says “Evan’s Princess.” I got that while I was on tour with Biohazard with Evan by a world-famous tattooist named Tin Tin at his shop in Paris. We’d only been together for two months at the time.

My next tattoos were the pink and black stars I have on the inside of my wrists. I got those done by Chris Nunez in 2006 on the TV show Miami Ink , and Evan got “Tera” tattooed on the side of his neck under his son’s name. (Evan also has “Linda” on his wrist, and a portrait of me with devil’s horns on his rib cage, by Mr. Cartoon.)

Next up was the dragon on my right arm by Hori Taku San at Mario Barth’s Starlight Tattoo shop in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. Chuck Zito and I were the first two people to get tattooed there. The outline was done with a modern tattoo gun, but the shading was done using the old-fashioned Tebori tapping style. Then Robert Atkinson finished up the arm with the cherry blossoms, water, and isobars.

And lastly, Hello Kitty is my favorite thing in the world so I just had to get a Hello Kitty tattoo. In December 2008, I got her dressed like a burlesque dancer on the back of my neck.

When Evan and I sat down in 2003 and decided I would reenter the porn world with Teravision, I told him that I didn’t want to shoot movies forever, especially not well into my thirties. Our plan was simple: Form our company, make lucrative deals, and film maybe ten movies for the next few years and then release them slowly in the coming years so there would be a steady stream of product, but I wouldn’t have to shoot month after month or year after year. So when I had enough movies in the can and the mainstream media was accepting me, I figured that was the time to stop filming and focus on other things, like my lingerie line, Mistress Couture, which my sister and I launched in 2007, or the burlesque show in Las Vegas that I am launching in 2010. Or, other projects included the Fit 4 Sex exercise videos, the Playboy TV show School for Sex , the Rock Star/Porn Star radio show we did for Sirius Radio, and working on Teravision and my website. I didn’t want to turn my back on the adult industry. I love the industry and I will forever be a part of it. I just didn’t want to be fucking on camera for a living for the rest of my life.

The problem was that while I might have wanted to stop filming, Evan wasn’t ready to stop. He had just begun. And he was enjoying being Spyder Jonez. He had quite a fan base and was really great on camera. So, one night in 2005 Evan sat me down and said, “Listen, you can stop doing porn. But I don’t want to.”

“Wait, what?” I reverted back to the jealous, insecure Tera who would scratch him up at the mere thought of him being with another girl. But I’m just like any other hot-blooded female in the world: I get jealous too. I have insecurities. I might be a porn star and head of a company, but I was also just a girl in love with a boy. And it was not easy at first to accept Evan’s desires to branch out in 2005.

“Hey, you know we’re doing Test Drive soon and I’d like to shoot a scene in it,” Evan said.

“Wait, what?!” I still couldn’t believe it. “You want to fuck another girl? You want to do a scene without me?”

“Well, think of this way: If I do the scene, you don’t have to pay a talent fee to another guy and it saves us money,” he said with a smirk.

This is when my doubts about Evan’s intentions started creeping into my brain, and I started to fear that our marriage was taking a turn I didn’t expect and certainly didn’t want.

The only thoughts running through my mind were that he was bored of fucking me, he wanted to fuck other girls, he would find someone he liked better and leave me for her. It was irrational. Being a porn star myself I should know that it’s just business. Porn stars are not like civilians. We can separate our work from our personal life. I should know, I fucked many men on-screen and it didn’t affect my marriage at all. I knew this. But I was really worried nonetheless. I worked my whole life to get to this place where I had my prince charming, and I didn’t want to lose that. That scared the hell out of me. I was afraid he’d find a saner girl and finally say to me, “You know what, Tera? You’re crazy. I can’t take it.” I just kept thinking, “But why?” No matter what reason he gave me, I would say, “But why?” There was no right answer.

We were both working so hard when it came to Teravision. He had put his music career on hold to be my CEO. And he wasn’t done living out his porn fantasies on-screen. He wanted to get his freak on, and that had nothing to do with his feelings toward me. You see, the difference between me and Evan is that Evan is ten times hornier than I am.

My big point was this: almost every couple in porn breaks up, and I didn’t want to be another porn statistic. I didn’t want the porn curse to hit us. I’ve seen it happen to other couples. Doing porn as a husband and wife team is safe, but once one branches out to do people outside the marriage, that’s when the trouble seems to set in, and I feared for our perfect marriage.

After the initial shock wore off, I was able to think rationally about the situation. I would be a hypocrite to not let him do other women for movies. I was doing other men and it didn’t hurt our marriage one bit. It’s just fucking, and with all the crew and cameras around, it’s more of a job than an intimate situation. We’re all professionals. You shake hands with your costar, you do your job, and you leave. There’s no attachment. If I wasn’t in porn and Evan wasn’t doing a scene, would I have let him fuck another girl? No. But we are in porn and it was for a scene, so the answer had to be yes.