I wanted to be a good Mormon wife, but more than that, I wanted to be an actress. More than that, I wanted to be famous. And you know, sitting in the hotel rooms and like being a call girl, I kind of got to be an actress. Bond Amy Bond, you know there's a there's a story about a young actress goes to Hollywood and she's hanging out at the counter of Schwab's drug store getting a milkshake or something, and some guy comes up with his fingers in the shape of a gold post and you know, trying to figure out whether you're a movie star, and he discovers her and she goes on to famine fortune. This trope has traveled as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood, but with Bond Amy Bond, it was a different sort of journey. Yeah, she kim to Hollywood. Yeah she wanted to be an actress, but in mainstream movies. I don't know, but I do know. I'm your host, Eugene. That's Robinson, and you're here for another edition of Ozzy Confidential. Robin Hood is an investing app that let you buy and sell stocks, et fs, options, and cryptos all commission free, while other broke just charge up to ten dollars for every trade. Robin Hood doesn't charge any commission fee, so you can trade stocks and keep all of your profits. Plus, there is no account minimum deposit needed to get started, so you can start investing at any level. The simple, intuitive design of robin Hood makes investing easy for newcomers and experts alike. View easy to understand charts and market data, and place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone. You can also if you stock collections such as A hundred most popular with robin Hood, you can learn how to invest in the market. As you build your portfolio, discover new stocks, track your favorite companies, and get custom notifications for price movements so you never missed the right moment to invest. Robin Hood is giving listeners of Ozzy Confidential or free stock like Apple, Ford or Sprint to help you build your portfolio. Sign up at Confidential dot robin hood dot com. So I grew up Mormon. My dad was Mormon until he died. My mom is like kind of Mormon. Um we were. Ray is Mormon, and I think out of everyone in my family, I probably became the most militant Mormon of everyone. When I was like thirteen, I got really into it. What does that? What does it mean to be like a military Mormon? Yeah, I mean, like you know, if you follow the rules, like by the letter of the law gets pretty intense. So like, you know, you go to church every day, and I went to a Bible study school before school and I had a hundred percent in attendance. And you know, that was really important to me. To deal with the magical underwear thing that you never take off your body. That's a thing, and it's everybody has weird practices. Magical underwear is one of them. You know. For a long time growing up, I believed that that I had this I have this mole on my chest and I believed and this belief was like confirmed for me by multiple elders of my church that God had put it on me to tell me where I should wear all my shirts above because that was that if I wore a shirt below that mole, it was being a modest. And you know, there's all these things that you tell yourselfer because God's trying to help you through life. I think a lot of people survived that way. My heart was always set on California. From the time I was young, I wanted to move to California. I wanted to be a Californian that you know, it's like a young girl Minnesota. Honestly, I think it was because of The Babysitters Club. This is the series of books that was very popular what I was like eight to fifteen years old. That was about this group of women girls who had started a club called the Babysitters Club. And one of the girls in the group was named Don and Don was the quintessential California girl. She had blonde hair, she was a vegetarian, she cared about animals, and she was an artist. And I loved that idea of like being an artist. How do you go from being a daily church girl at the age of thirteen to being a young adult chasing their dreams. I was traveling to finish school and then you know, doing that backpacking thing, and uh, I was in no pair and really just I felt like a bohemian for the first time in my life. I was like, oh, this is cool. Like I met all these artists in Paris and I was eighteen at the height of the Iraq War, and so there are a lot of the people I met were like squatters and like Paris mansions, and they would they would go out on the artists and war and I like met all these I was in no pair, but I had a lot of spare time, so I got to go hang out with these people, and they really um shaped the way thought about spending time, because up until then I came from a military slash very religious background, and time was a thing that you, like I did to to like put into work, and the idea that you like spent it creating paper mache caricatures of George wish to go put in a float would probably be an insane thing too, or like a waste to those demographics. And suddenly I was immersed in this world of artists and it felt very deep and real to me and like a good way to spend time rather than what many would consider a waste of it. But I was still very Mormon, and so I was balancing this like go to church on Sundays and read the Bible every night before you go to bed, with like, oh, but there's all these cool people who you know, many of them didn't believe in God and um, and I thought that was just crazy, you know, like that's just wrong. And so I would pray for them for their souls to be saved, because that's what you do. And um and I was able to like kind of live in both worlds really easily. And I think that's actually probably my superpower as a human, as I'm able to straddle different world I had purchased this keyboard piano that because one of the guys who was in this UM protest group played the keyboard and he had started teaching me. But I wasn't very dedicated. But I liked how when I carried this keyboard around, people thought I was an artist. As soon as I put that keyboard under my arm. It was so easy to get hitchhike rides because people are like, oh, she's an artist, you know, she just needs to get to her next gig. And I remember I had one with this one truck driver. I was like, I'll take you if you play me a song, and I was literally like I can't. It also had like seventy pounds and I carried it the whole way to Italy. Can't you play it now? You figure not, Na, No, you can't understood. It was like it was a plot device to get her from a place of no adventure to a place of adventure, a physical place as well as a fantastical place that existed in her mind and later reality, except she still can't play keyboard. I went to Europe mainly because my parents were fine with me traveling as long as it was international. They're in the military, so they're big thing was, you've got to travel the world. You've got to see how the rest of the world lives. And so it was okay to go to Europe. But then, you know, I really wanted to go to California, and so I went back home, made some money, and then I got on a bus and and had one backpack. I didn't have a keyboard anymore. And then I moved to California and I had no plan. So were they cool with this? Or were they? I wrote them a note I ran away because they knew they wouldn't be cool with it. They wouldn't be cool with California. They wouldn't be cool with California because, I mean, my mom was the only woman, the only person and her family to graduate from college. In her mind, going to California meant that I wasn't going to keep going to community college and get my degree. And you know, for her, getting her degree was her pathway to freedom. So okay, So so you say you send them a note, I run away. I'm in California, and did I wrote them a note. I said, you're not gonna like this. But I got on a bus and I moved into California to chase my dreams to become an actress. I called my mom from Texas when the bus landed, and I called her and said, I'm okay, I'm safe. She was very unhappy. She just wanted she said, are you okay? What the funk are you doing? And yeah, that's kind of what I expected. You know, you just want to tell you we're okay. I wanted her to know I was okay, that I loved her very much. I had nothing to do with her, blah blah blah, but I needed to like go create my own path, right. I landed in Los Angeles and like I didn't have a room to rent, Like I had not planned nothing, because in my mind, if I planned it, then it wasn't like the way an artist would do it. So the bus stations in downtown l a work. Yeah, bus station lands in downtown l A. At like three o'clock in the morning. I walk out into the parking lot with my like little I think my backpack had actual sparkles on it, and there were two security guards standing in front of a parking lot next to the Gray homebus station. There's like glass all over the cement. There's people sleeping on the parking lot, which I've never seen before, and like freak out and I run back into the Gray Home bus station and these two security guards. I see one of them past the other five dollar bill and goes We had a bet on how long you'd be out there, and so I sat at this Gray homebus station for like three hours. I told myself, well, if you get to Westwood, that's where there's u C l A. And then you can go find like a corkboard with somebody who has housing for rent. And that's how I lived in Europe, you know, you just find a corkboard and a coffee shop and then you get your next place to live. So we go look at all these corkboards in l A. And everything is so expensive. And by the time I'm done looking at all these corkboards, like the sun is going down, so I'm like, well, I'm not going to find a place tonight, like my my one plan is backfired. And on the bus, I was so excited. I hadn't eaten in like three days, Like I had just been too excited to eat. And so I'm walking with like my luggage down this street and I think I was I was probably crying and like walking down the street like oh ship, what am I gonna do? And this car pulls up behind me and this guy jumps out and he goes hey. Then I'm like, what you know. He's like, you look like you need help. And so, long story short, I end up living with this dude for like three weeks, was the old was the story. He was a graduate student at U C. L A. And I think he liked the idea of saving somebody so perfect. I needed some out. So it was great. So there was no creepy alterior sexual motive. There was no creepy alterior thing. I made it very clear at this and I was still a virgin. I'm like, I'm a virgin. I'm very religious. I don't believe in premarital sex. So you said this as you got in the car. Well, when when we got to his house. I was like, look, I don't want it to be weird, and he was cool. And this dude like drove me around. He helped log me into his like student board so that I could look at all the housing that was on the internet, like on the u c L a specific internet. He helped me find a room. I found a room that was like three seventy five a month in Westwood. I shared it with like two other people and it was fine. So this guy really did like that's a solid basically saying, yeah, why did you finally leave? Oh? I guess you found the room. I found the room. He helped me find the room. Like it was never like a long term solution, but he was like, I think you need help. I can help you. Yeah, all right, so you get your room. I got my room. And Rick had driven me to Central Casting the first day after I stayed at his house, and I had heard that Central Casting was where everybody went when they were trying to be an actor. So I went there. I got my head shot taken and lo and behold, they called me in like five minutes and they were like, do you want to do judge Judy? Sure? So I sat in the audience on Judge Judy, and then I sat in the audience of Judge Joe Brown. And then I sat in the audience there was another judge. I forgot the third judge, but I like, I like worked the audience of Judge shows for like three months. How much were they? The opinion is an extra? Right? Was an extra today? Fine? Good enough? Like my rents four hundred bucks? Fine, you can tell the folks back home. I'm on the show, on that show, that's right. So anyway I'm on Judge Judy. I start going to all of these other casting calls and I just can't nail like a real part, like a part that has speaking right. And in order to get the SAG card, which is the holy grail for new actors in l A, you have to get like three speaking parts. And I remember going on this audition where there are these three girls, three girls sitting in you had acting classes before or not? I had never taken an acting class. Also, by the way, I had tried out for my Hopkins High School Minnetonka, Minnesota High School musical. I couldn't even get a part in that. So, like, I'm by no means like an actress, like, but I played an artist when I played that part, when when I was the keyboard, you know, and I was like, if I just do it, then it will come true for me. And to a certain extent, I think that's kind of a great way to live your life. But for me, I was overly confident, Like I was very positive that I was going to be famous in like three months, and like there was no doubt in my mind that was going to happen. So then that didn't happen in three months, and I had started to run out of money, and and I meet these three girls at a sandal audition was like an audition to be in a sandal commercial, you mean the resort or the actual footwear like a sandal. So I'm at this audition and the three other girls who I'm sitting there with, and by the way, I had like taken the bus there, woken up at like five am to get to this ten am audition was still late, so i'd like run the last half mile. And I'm sitting there like sweaty and feeling just like the most disgusting person. And I'm looking at these three women and they're like, you know, they're wearing like very expensive clothes. They have like keratin treatments in their hair, their nails are well done, and they had had they had They were talking about how they had just gotten their tone nails done for this audition, and I was like, oh, you got your tone nails done for this audition and they were like, yeah, that's what you do. You dress for the part you want. Like one of them looked at me with this very like mean girl look and she was like, you dress for the part you want. And I was like, oh, like, I need to make like real money. I need to buy a car, I need to like buy pedicures when I go on auditions, like I need to do all this ship. I didn't know that. So then I decided, Well, the reason I'm not booking these, why I'm not nailing them and then getting the parts, is because I just need more money in order to like play the part. Scant funds. And you see that you're being outpaced by people who were spending a lot to look a lot better and act actually act, So what do you do? So I started nude modeling and that was like step one. I was did you find the agency that got you new modeling? Yeah? I mean yeah, you answer an ad the back of l A Weekly has everything you need. I answered two outs. I answered the back of an l A Weekly, And the two outs were one was a woman who was basically like a pimp, right, and her thing her ads said no sex. And I really liked the idea that I could come, that I could do this work but go back to being religious because I was still dating this Mormon guy at the same time where DC and I was just lying to him about everything close to your parents, close to my parents, and this plan to eventually come out to really going to do the long distance thing. See how it worked, right? I mean I think his plan was like, we'll get married and then you'll come live with me. But I like, how did she make my dream come true? Right? So I get hooked up with this woman who, um like, does nude modeling shoots, and I get hooked up with another woman who, um she puts you up in a hotel room and then you do massages. Right. So that was my pimp woman. Yeah. I never learned her name. I always called her my girl. But she was no nonsense. And I love that bitch because when you talked to her, you knew she was in a hurry. She had better ship to do than talk to you right now. So it was always super straightforward to the point, get in there, I'll call you when someone is here. I'll pick up the money at ten thirty, and we did like a fifty fifty split. So after like two weeks of like the nude modeling and the massages in the hotel room, which by the way, it was usually actually massages. Yeah, it's just like lonely dudes. So it was actually like pretty cool. So the nude modeling thing was the was there a product associated with that? So we're taking pictures of you for posters, we're taking pictures uh painters are So there's a lot of photographers who do pictures that they think they can sell to a magazine, porno mag or anything. And in my mind the time, nobody actually looks at porn. So I'm never going to get caught doing this because I didn't look at porn. The guy I was dating, I believed it didn't look at porn. So you weren't draped over a nicely covered couch with grapes in your hand. You know, the person is already in the hotel or you're in the room and they come to you. My girl calls me, hey, your name is Candy Berryes coming up in ten minutes. So the guy comes in the room, and what happens. He takes all his clothes off. She was very clear about the order of operations. So you know, he has to put the money on the nights to first, and then he can take his clothes off because the cops never gonna just like put money down. So if he doesn't put money down, run for your life. All right, all right? Did you ask her Steven would be like where the fire escape? She didn't. Not do you ever at any point ask her like, why why are we afraid of cops? It's just a massage? No, that made sense? Yeah, okay. I was like, I think this is illegal. This is probably illegal, but like that just made it more exciting. I was here for the adventure. So now these guys showed up from massages. Nobody tried to fuck you, Nobody tried to suck me, like, absolutely nobody. Yeah. It wasn't until I started doing house calls that that changed. So in call versus outcol So, somebody calls, I want a massage at my house, and she said, okay, well it works out all right. He showed you the house and then what happens in and then all that all bets are off, like they'll offer more money for additional services. So my girl had a really smart that. I think it's really smart. I mean she's the only pimp I've ever worked with, you know, which is she would only send me to places where I was with somebody else. So it was like two girls that were ordered. So they asked for two girls yea with other girls willing to have sex or not. Oh yeah, okay, so you almost always the other girl was willing to have sucks and like down like they were down to fuck because then they got more money. I was like, I think, God, I can't go that far because God won't forgive me. So you were sitting there as you're screwing or you're like, it's okay, I did the massage. I'll just sit out here and wait for you. Guys know I watched okay, so you're there, okay. I mean usually I would like fondle somebody, you know, I would like massage somebody, fondle somebody, you know, like, hey, can you play with her? Tiths? Sure? You know that will be an extra. That was my question, and so how much how much money are you pulling now from So between those two things, nude modeling was like four hundred a day and it was kind of like six hour days, a lot of standing around and being cold, which is, you know, kind of boring. And then the like face to face was much more exciting because you're seeing this whole as as a Mormon turned thrown into the sex world's human I was like, holy sh it, you know, this is so insane. This is like what movies are about. I didn't think this was real, you know. And so I would make a lot of cash between the hotel rooms and the massages and the calls I would make. At the beginning, I only did hotel rooms, so I would make about eight hundred two thousand a day if I did like a full day sitting in a hotel room. The new modeling like four D. So she meets this photographer Mike Square. Guy takes a lot of photos of her. But one day Mike has gotta problem. He's taking too many photos of her and overexposure is an issue, and he's like, you know, but what you could do is porn. And by the way, it pays a lot better, and I was like, wow, isn't that kind of what I'm already doing. So he introduced his ma to Jim South. I don't know who Jim South is. He's a legend, but at the time, I'm like, oh, hi, Jim. You know, small man in a cowboy hut and he's in this office off of Van Eyes that's like dirty and like kind of dusty and kind of musty and gross, and so I don't think of him as this like, you know, epic legend who like starts all these careers. To me, Poorma is not a career. It was like a gateway to be able to do the thing I really wanted to do. And I'm still like undecided on like the porn thing. I'm like, well, go meet Jim, but I don't know if I'm going to have sex with anyone important. Like that actually sounded so insane that it like made me really excited that it was an adventure. And um So I meet Jim and Jim tells me, well, you know there's this guy named um At Powers. Yeah, and I'm like, okay, And what I don't tell Jim, And what I hadn't told Mike, because I thought that they wouldn't want to book me is that I'm still a virgin, Like I'm still a virgin, but I'm also a sex worker. So that's a weird mix, right. I don't tell them that, But I really liked the idea that Ed was nice. He was nice, he wasn't going to be aggressive. And there's another woman in the office at that time, and she turns around and she's like, Jim's the best. He will never put you in a compromise situation. So already this girl who's sitting in the office is like, I'm vouching for this guy, Like he's the real deal, Like he won't put you in a bad situation. Which is what I really liked about my girl. She always made sure that we were we were safe. I got really lucky in that sense because I wasn't fucked with that, I wasn't raped, and I had a lot of fun being an adult entertainment actress. Anyway, So you go over to its place and he has this fancy house in Calabasas. Couldn't be nicer. I like, comes to the door, So are you going with the understanding? Like, Oh, I'm just gonna meet this guy or do you know now? I'm like, I'm going to do this alright, and so my my stomach is like churning. I like, see the big mansion. I'm like, oh, ship, like this is happening, and so what you like one or I think I was still nineteen. It's like right after my twentieth birthday, alright, yeah, I mean six months later I went to an adult entertainment event that I couldn't get into at a club because I wasn't twenty one to drink, all right, So so you show him it has He's got this mansion and he's nice, super nice. He asked me a bunch of questions. He could like, tell me about you. He loves the fact that I have a Mormon boyfriend, so we talked about that and then he could tell he was super nervous. So he's like really gentle, really nice, really kind. He was. He's just like very you just felt like what you were getting was very authentic, and he was. And then he paid me with a check and he had to be like, oh, what's your real name again? To Candy. Well, Mike and I had decided that my name would be Wendy, So my poor name was Wendy James. Yeah, Wendy James. She is a singer as well. Yeah I now know that, but I didn't at the time, and so, you know, he said, you know, you've got that Peter Pan thing, that like forever youth thing going on, so you should be Wendy. But I was there for probably like an hour and a half, two hours, and I walk out with fifteen hundred bucks, So I'm like, fuck, yeah, I can pay like six months rent with this thing. Like I'm on my way to my fifty grand. Now, given that this was your first time, that people have all this kind of um not necessarily romantic attached, but significant attachment to their first time, how did this How did this feel as the first time? Was it more or less than what you had expected before? I'm trying to get a fix in your frame of mind issue as you leave. It really wasn't about this, So it was about the money. So I like took myself to Starbucks, got a vanilla frappuccino. Look at my phone, which by now I have a new phone, and there's like five missed voicemails from Jim that are like, Wendy, everybody wants to book you and on the basis, off the basis of the new modeling pictures, they see this like fresh faced, chair up looking girl. You know, I've got that girl next door look. And and then it's just like off to the races. Like every place that I want on an audition for there was a two side a piece of paper that said what you were willing to do, like, do you do like double penetration? Nope? Do you do anal nope? Do you do lesbian? Great? It was fun, Like I'm I met so many fun people, Like it was fun and the people were really nice to me. Do you have time left over to actually go on auditions for non adult rules? Yeah? Like I still every Wednesday. I reserved Wednesday to be on the extra on Judge Juty Judge Show Brown, and I kept that because it was my perfect cover. When I went to church on Sundays, people would be like, oh, I saw you on Judge Duty perfect. You can see I am a struggling actress exactly how I want you to think. You know, my boyfriend, Oh I saw you on Judge Judy. Oh perfect. I was like living a double life, like I was trying my best to live a double life. The dude in d C. Four months into the porn I'm like, look, this is what's going on. I'm probably like I'm really enjoying this life. I don't think I'm actually Mormon anymore. And for him, he like ran the other direction, which like this is antithetical to everything. He believes that when you said you told him you're not you don't think you're into do you tell them about the movies or now? I casually mentioned that maybe I had done an adults entertainment Yeah. I did not say porn. I did not say sex work. I said adult entertainment. Did he get angry or was he just upset? Oh? I mean he was heartbroken. Yeah, And like what would you feel if you'd believe this person you were in love with has been betraying you and lying to you for the past like four months. Like that's shitty because on the side, we were talking about how we were going to get married. Shitty. Yeah, it's a shitty way to treat someone. But also I was over the church, Like by that point I was like, you know, I don't think this is really so then I live in my best life for a good like four months. Call girling. I'm going on cool gigs, and I wasn't really auditioning for real movies anymore because that was what I was going to do. After I'd made all my cash and going on set. Suddenly I'm like known as like a rising starlet in the porn world, which is crazy, you know, not now if if this were some other podcasts and some other interview this is the point at which the interviewer gets his tone in their voice where they indicate that they feel fucking sorry for you. There's somehow that this is somehow a deviation, a deviation from the normal, that is somehow sad. But it doesn't sound at all to me like that jibs with the reality that you're spelling out. And most people would say they imagine life working as a point star and a call girl would be miserable, But it doesn't sound like that was your experience. It was fantastic, and for me it was quite autonomous. For the first time in my life, I'm making my own money, like real fucking money, Like this is not like Nordstrom commission money where you got like a thousand bucks a month. Like this is like you're bringing in like two granded day cool, and if you're disciplined enough to like put it away, that adds up really fast. I mean it got to the point where I couldn't like go to the bank and look at the teller anymore because they look at me suspiciously. What do you what do you say to those people that who say, like this is degrading and that this is not something that should and I don't want to minimize I don't want to minimize that that argument as well. I mean for me, I didn't know enough to like think of myself as like an empowered sex worker, right, Like I think if you talked to there's a famous author named D'Antonio Crane, and there are all these you know, Stormy Daniels is a great example. I mean, she's an American hero at one, but also she's a woman who was like, she is a sex worker, and she is loud and proud about being a sex worker. I was never that, So I want to be clear about that. I was never loud and proud. I was always lying about it. There was never a time when I was fully honest with anyone about the fact that I was doing it, because I clearly, like felt some shame about it even after I stopped being Mormon, so I didn't think of myself that way. But it was the first time in my life that I thought of myself as the owner of my own body. And like, you know, nobody told me what they are going to do to my body. They always asked on a piece of paper, what are we? What are where are your boundaries? And that's what I loved about porn, as everything was so upfront. Yes, this is a transaction, Yes this is for money. Yes we will be trading sex, but I would need to know where your boundaries are. And porn is highly regulated, so like you do your HIV test every thirty days, and you show your piece of paper to the other actor, and if they don't have your paper their paper, you are not having sex with them. And growing up religious, I never thought of my body really is mine. I thought of it as a tool to like have children with and something really to be ashamed of. And so then I'm like immersed in this world. It's telling me not only as your body yours, but also you can like very utilitarian lie like make money with it, and also it's something to be celebrated so much so that we're going to sell this, you know, like, and so that was all like very new and exciting for me. And so now I'm making really good cash, but I have to make it seem like I'm still a starving artist, right, So I'm like playing at being I'm like acting in my real life at being a starving artist, which I'm not anymore. I have like a ton of cash and I'm just like putting into the bank and I'm like, you're actually being good about that, because you're not. I was great about that. Yes, I didn't get into drugs until I'm at a dude, and then that's kind of where the fun ended. You paid attention at all. The narrative is usually things start going wrong and then you get into porn. An actual fact, porn was a high point and they didn't start going wrong for Amy until after she left porn. The bad Boyfriend, the drugs hashtag it all. So I meet this dude, and I meet him as a call girl. He's like one of my clients, and I fall in love with him, and maybe more than falling in love with him, I fall in love with his math. As soon as I move in with him. It's abusive. He's in the middle of a divorce, and so I get in my car, I drive away. I'm like, fuck you, I'm not moving in after all, and he does the thing right. I'm so sorry, baby. It will never happen again. Oh my god, I can't believe that happened. It's because of my divorce and all of the stress of my divorce. I go back that night. I go back over and over and over. We do math all night long. We fight all the time. It's kind of exciting. So now what what a folks going back home at this point anything. My sister actually moved to see me Valley. She moves in with me and Manny this guy who is abusive. Why did she do this? Because I won't leave him, like I keep not leaving him. So she moves out specifically to help you leave him or yea, and she had to as a plan, We're going to run away in the middle of the night. She finds a place for us to live, like secretly, and then in the middle of the night she has this backpacked for us and we run away like sleeping or he's not there. He's sleeping, but he's not sleeping. That hard because five minutes after we walk out the front door and start walking down the street. I can hear his car and he had a link in with like a really high cylinder engine. And so when he starts his card and know what that sounds like, and I'm like, oh fuck, that's manny. We run down the street. We hide in the bushes of this graveyard that's like behind the house that we were living in. And it's like straight out of like a movie, Like we're like hiding from this guy. And he's texting me every two minutes, you piece of ship. What are you doing. I'm gonna find you. I'm going to kill you. Yeah. We try to get a restraining order. It's not enough that he's made these threats over text message. And she literally saved my life and and we just we go back to being waitresses together. And I lived with my sister and the dude slowly fades away exactly and um, and then I read Build My Life. So I went to community college. It took me like six years to finish a two year degree like get my a. A took six years, and I m transferred to Berkeley. So I got into UC Berkeley good enough to get into Berkeley exactly did when did you meet your husband? I met my husband. Um, after I graduated from Berkeley. I was in Portland, Oregon working as an ELSAT tutor, So I was tutoring ELSA. I was a personal trainer on the side, and uh, and I was just like taking that gap year between undergrad and law school. You know, I didn't want to meet anyone before law school because I wanted to be able to focus. But I meet Keith, and it was just like love at first sight situation, and it wasn't even a choice. It's like, this is the person I'm going to spend my life with. And you know, right now, I I run two pole dance studios and I'm an attorney, so you know, on the weekends, I do like credible fear interviews for immigrants who are trying to come to the United States. And then immigration law is one that I've recently become interested in because of the human rights violations that United States government is involved in in terms of how we're separating children from their families and and we actually don't have a process for reuniting those children. And there's just an article about how, um, you know, all these parents were sent back to Guatemala their children are still here living in foster families. That's crazy. So immigration law is not my specialty, but I've gotten really into it in the past year. So I run businesses by day, and I, you know, create pole dance art, which is kind of weird and underground to most people, even though it's what I see every day and um and do law on the weekends. And that's kind of how I like to live my life. Okay, So if you're not, you're not stuck in some corporate law thing where you've got billable hours to be with or no. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean I meet a lot of those people. I know a lot of those people. It's really shaped the way that I think about my body now, which is just a tool. And you know, my my creative work as a pole dancer and a competitive pole dancer now is really around like creating art with my body. And I'm not sure I would have ever, um not, had had not had this shame to be able to do that if it hadn't been for becoming a sex worker so long ago. And I wish that I had had a place that was so full of like female empowerment and like women celebrating other women, and you know, moving to l A and having my formative growing up years be like women competing with other women for roles or whatever, um, and only finding that real like support in the adult entertainment industry um, and then having that taken from me because I made a poor relationship decision. UM. Like I wish I had had spaces like this that we're safe spaces to express sexuality. And so that's why they're so important to me and why I create them today, and so I want to keep doing this. If you could tell your younger self something, what would you tell your younger self? I think it would be the opposite of what you would expect, which is for the for the ten years after I got out of porn, I didn't talk about my story. I told myself that it was something to be ashamed of, and and the world around me told me the same thing too. Write like when people who when I was a waitress men would recognize me, and then they would use the fact that they recognized me against me. They'd like wait for me in the parking lot and be like, I know your secret, you know, if we don't fuck whatever, Da da da. And it was to the point where I had somebody escort me to my car, and I wish that I had just owned my story earlier, Like I wish that, you know, I'm really proud of, Like, looking back, I'm really proud of how like resourceful I was. You know, I arrived in Los Angeles with nothing, then I found Rick and you know, and then I just let myself be open to the universe in a way that the universe actually really did take care of me. And I'm a really big believer in like having a life that's not so stringently planned that like you let the world happen to you versus like trying to control everything. And um, and I wish I hadn't spent so much time feeling shame for something that's actually like a really exciting cool thing looking back on it now. It wasn't until about five year US ago when I'm living here, so a decade in um San Francisco, So about a decade after all of this story is over, that my fam texts me and she says, Hey, Amy, who's Wendy James. And I'm like, oh, betch, You're gonna need to sit down for this one. If your adventure high point hits when you're twenty and you're thirty five. Now looking back on greatness, can you square yourself going forward with a life that you expect won't be nearly as adventurous. I don't know. I don't know, but Bond Amy Bond, I guess she's geared to find out, and so are we. Azzy Confidential Ozzy Confidential is produced by who ELL's me Eugeneus Robinson, executive produced by Rob Coolo's and mixed and engineered by Nick Johanson. And For more Azi Confidential go to o z y dot com, slash Confidential, Hush Hush

I wanted to be a good Mormon wife, but more than that, I wanted to be an actress. More than that, I wanted to be famous. And you know, sitting in the hotel rooms and like being a call girl, I kind of got to be an actress. Bond Amy Bond, you know there's a there's a story about a young actress goes to Hollywood and she's hanging out at the counter of Schwab's drug store getting a milkshake or something, and some guy comes up with his fingers in the shape of a gold post and you know, trying to figure out whether you're a movie star, and he discovers her and she goes on to famine fortune. This trope has traveled as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood, but with Bond Amy Bond, it was a different sort of journey. Yeah, she kim to Hollywood. Yeah she wanted to be an actress, but in mainstream movies. I don't know, but I do know. I'm your host, Eugene. That's Robinson, and you're here for another edition of Ozzy Confidential. Robin Hood is an investing app that let you buy and sell stocks, et fs, options, and cryptos all commission free, while other broke just charge up to ten dollars for every trade. Robin Hood doesn't charge any commission fee, so you can trade stocks and keep all of your profits. Plus, there is no account minimum deposit needed to get started, so you can start investing at any level. The simple, intuitive design of robin Hood makes investing easy for newcomers and experts alike. View easy to understand charts and market data, and place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone. You can also if you stock collections such as A hundred most popular with robin Hood, you can learn how to invest in the market. As you build your portfolio, discover new stocks, track your favorite companies, and get custom notifications for price movements so you never missed the right moment to invest. Robin Hood is giving listeners of Ozzy Confidential or free stock like Apple, Ford or Sprint to help you build your portfolio. Sign up at Confidential dot robin hood dot com. So I grew up Mormon. My dad was Mormon until he died. My mom is like kind of Mormon. Um we were. Ray is Mormon, and I think out of everyone in my family, I probably became the most militant Mormon of everyone. When I was like thirteen, I got really into it. What does that? What does it mean to be like a military Mormon? Yeah, I mean, like you know, if you follow the rules, like by the letter of the law gets pretty intense. So like, you know, you go to church every day, and I went to a Bible study school before school and I had a hundred percent in attendance. And you know, that was really important to me. To deal with the magical underwear thing that you never take off your body. That's a thing, and it's everybody has weird practices. Magical underwear is one of them. You know. For a long time growing up, I believed that that I had this I have this mole on my chest and I believed and this belief was like confirmed for me by multiple elders of my church that God had put it on me to tell me where I should wear all my shirts above because that was that if I wore a shirt below that mole, it was being a modest. And you know, there's all these things that you tell yourselfer because God's trying to help you through life. I think a lot of people survived that way. My heart was always set on California. From the time I was young, I wanted to move to California. I wanted to be a Californian that you know, it's like a young girl Minnesota. Honestly, I think it was because of The Babysitters Club. This is the series of books that was very popular what I was like eight to fifteen years old. That was about this group of women girls who had started a club called the Babysitters Club. And one of the girls in the group was named Don and Don was the quintessential California girl. She had blonde hair, she was a vegetarian, she cared about animals, and she was an artist. And I loved that idea of like being an artist. How do you go from being a daily church girl at the age of thirteen to being a young adult chasing their dreams. I was traveling to finish school and then you know, doing that backpacking thing, and uh, I was in no pair and really just I felt like a bohemian for the first time in my life. I was like, oh, this is cool. Like I met all these artists in Paris and I was eighteen at the height of the Iraq War, and so there are a lot of the people I met were like squatters and like Paris mansions, and they would they would go out on the artists and war and I like met all these I was in no pair, but I had a lot of spare time, so I got to go hang out with these people, and they really um shaped the way thought about spending time, because up until then I came from a military slash very religious background, and time was a thing that you, like I did to to like put into work, and the idea that you like spent it creating paper mache caricatures of George wish to go put in a float would probably be an insane thing too, or like a waste to those demographics. And suddenly I was immersed in this world of artists and it felt very deep and real to me and like a good way to spend time rather than what many would consider a waste of it. But I was still very Mormon, and so I was balancing this like go to church on Sundays and read the Bible every night before you go to bed, with like, oh, but there's all these cool people who you know, many of them didn't believe in God and um, and I thought that was just crazy, you know, like that's just wrong. And so I would pray for them for their souls to be saved, because that's what you do. And um and I was able to like kind of live in both worlds really easily. And I think that's actually probably my superpower as a human, as I'm able to straddle different world I had purchased this keyboard piano that because one of the guys who was in this UM protest group played the keyboard and he had started teaching me. But I wasn't very dedicated. But I liked how when I carried this keyboard around, people thought I was an artist. As soon as I put that keyboard under my arm. It was so easy to get hitchhike rides because people are like, oh, she's an artist, you know, she just needs to get to her next gig. And I remember I had one with this one truck driver. I was like, I'll take you if you play me a song, and I was literally like I can't. It also had like seventy pounds and I carried it the whole way to Italy. Can't you play it now? You figure not, Na, No, you can't understood. It was like it was a plot device to get her from a place of no adventure to a place of adventure, a physical place as well as a fantastical place that existed in her mind and later reality, except she still can't play keyboard. I went to Europe mainly because my parents were fine with me traveling as long as it was international. They're in the military, so they're big thing was, you've got to travel the world. You've got to see how the rest of the world lives. And so it was okay to go to Europe. But then, you know, I really wanted to go to California, and so I went back home, made some money, and then I got on a bus and and had one backpack. I didn't have a keyboard anymore. And then I moved to California and I had no plan. So were they cool with this? Or were they? I wrote them a note I ran away because they knew they wouldn't be cool with it. They wouldn't be cool with California. They wouldn't be cool with California because, I mean, my mom was the only woman, the only person and her family to graduate from college. In her mind, going to California meant that I wasn't going to keep going to community college and get my degree. And you know, for her, getting her degree was her pathway to freedom. So okay, So so you say you send them a note, I run away. I'm in California, and did I wrote them a note. I said, you're not gonna like this. But I got on a bus and I moved into California to chase my dreams to become an actress. I called my mom from Texas when the bus landed, and I called her and said, I'm okay, I'm safe. She was very unhappy. She just wanted she said, are you okay? What the funk are you doing? And yeah, that's kind of what I expected. You know, you just want to tell you we're okay. I wanted her to know I was okay, that I loved her very much. I had nothing to do with her, blah blah blah, but I needed to like go create my own path, right. I landed in Los Angeles and like I didn't have a room to rent, Like I had not planned nothing, because in my mind, if I planned it, then it wasn't like the way an artist would do it. So the bus stations in downtown l a work. Yeah, bus station lands in downtown l A. At like three o'clock in the morning. I walk out into the parking lot with my like little I think my backpack had actual sparkles on it, and there were two security guards standing in front of a parking lot next to the Gray homebus station. There's like glass all over the cement. There's people sleeping on the parking lot, which I've never seen before, and like freak out and I run back into the Gray Home bus station and these two security guards. I see one of them past the other five dollar bill and goes We had a bet on how long you'd be out there, and so I sat at this Gray homebus station for like three hours. I told myself, well, if you get to Westwood, that's where there's u C l A. And then you can go find like a corkboard with somebody who has housing for rent. And that's how I lived in Europe, you know, you just find a corkboard and a coffee shop and then you get your next place to live. So we go look at all these corkboards in l A. And everything is so expensive. And by the time I'm done looking at all these corkboards, like the sun is going down, so I'm like, well, I'm not going to find a place tonight, like my my one plan is backfired. And on the bus, I was so excited. I hadn't eaten in like three days, Like I had just been too excited to eat. And so I'm walking with like my luggage down this street and I think I was I was probably crying and like walking down the street like oh ship, what am I gonna do? And this car pulls up behind me and this guy jumps out and he goes hey. Then I'm like, what you know. He's like, you look like you need help. And so, long story short, I end up living with this dude for like three weeks, was the old was the story. He was a graduate student at U C. L A. And I think he liked the idea of saving somebody so perfect. I needed some out. So it was great. So there was no creepy alterior sexual motive. There was no creepy alterior thing. I made it very clear at this and I was still a virgin. I'm like, I'm a virgin. I'm very religious. I don't believe in premarital sex. So you said this as you got in the car. Well, when when we got to his house. I was like, look, I don't want it to be weird, and he was cool. And this dude like drove me around. He helped log me into his like student board so that I could look at all the housing that was on the internet, like on the u c L a specific internet. He helped me find a room. I found a room that was like three seventy five a month in Westwood. I shared it with like two other people and it was fine. So this guy really did like that's a solid basically saying, yeah, why did you finally leave? Oh? I guess you found the room. I found the room. He helped me find the room. Like it was never like a long term solution, but he was like, I think you need help. I can help you. Yeah, all right, so you get your room. I got my room. And Rick had driven me to Central Casting the first day after I stayed at his house, and I had heard that Central Casting was where everybody went when they were trying to be an actor. So I went there. I got my head shot taken and lo and behold, they called me in like five minutes and they were like, do you want to do judge Judy? Sure? So I sat in the audience on Judge Judy, and then I sat in the audience of Judge Joe Brown. And then I sat in the audience there was another judge. I forgot the third judge, but I like, I like worked the audience of Judge shows for like three months. How much were they? The opinion is an extra? Right? Was an extra today? Fine? Good enough? Like my rents four hundred bucks? Fine, you can tell the folks back home. I'm on the show, on that show, that's right. So anyway I'm on Judge Judy. I start going to all of these other casting calls and I just can't nail like a real part, like a part that has speaking right. And in order to get the SAG card, which is the holy grail for new actors in l A, you have to get like three speaking parts. And I remember going on this audition where there are these three girls, three girls sitting in you had acting classes before or not? I had never taken an acting class. Also, by the way, I had tried out for my Hopkins High School Minnetonka, Minnesota High School musical. I couldn't even get a part in that. So, like, I'm by no means like an actress, like, but I played an artist when I played that part, when when I was the keyboard, you know, and I was like, if I just do it, then it will come true for me. And to a certain extent, I think that's kind of a great way to live your life. But for me, I was overly confident, Like I was very positive that I was going to be famous in like three months, and like there was no doubt in my mind that was going to happen. So then that didn't happen in three months, and I had started to run out of money, and and I meet these three girls at a sandal audition was like an audition to be in a sandal commercial, you mean the resort or the actual footwear like a sandal. So I'm at this audition and the three other girls who I'm sitting there with, and by the way, I had like taken the bus there, woken up at like five am to get to this ten am audition was still late, so i'd like run the last half mile. And I'm sitting there like sweaty and feeling just like the most disgusting person. And I'm looking at these three women and they're like, you know, they're wearing like very expensive clothes. They have like keratin treatments in their hair, their nails are well done, and they had had they had They were talking about how they had just gotten their tone nails done for this audition, and I was like, oh, you got your tone nails done for this audition and they were like, yeah, that's what you do. You dress for the part you want. Like one of them looked at me with this very like mean girl look and she was like, you dress for the part you want. And I was like, oh, like, I need to make like real money. I need to buy a car, I need to like buy pedicures when I go on auditions, like I need to do all this ship. I didn't know that. So then I decided, Well, the reason I'm not booking these, why I'm not nailing them and then getting the parts, is because I just need more money in order to like play the part. Scant funds. And you see that you're being outpaced by people who were spending a lot to look a lot better and act actually act, So what do you do? So I started nude modeling and that was like step one. I was did you find the agency that got you new modeling? Yeah? I mean yeah, you answer an ad the back of l A Weekly has everything you need. I answered two outs. I answered the back of an l A Weekly, And the two outs were one was a woman who was basically like a pimp, right, and her thing her ads said no sex. And I really liked the idea that I could come, that I could do this work but go back to being religious because I was still dating this Mormon guy at the same time where DC and I was just lying to him about everything close to your parents, close to my parents, and this plan to eventually come out to really going to do the long distance thing. See how it worked, right? I mean I think his plan was like, we'll get married and then you'll come live with me. But I like, how did she make my dream come true? Right? So I get hooked up with this woman who, um like, does nude modeling shoots, and I get hooked up with another woman who, um she puts you up in a hotel room and then you do massages. Right. So that was my pimp woman. Yeah. I never learned her name. I always called her my girl. But she was no nonsense. And I love that bitch because when you talked to her, you knew she was in a hurry. She had better ship to do than talk to you right now. So it was always super straightforward to the point, get in there, I'll call you when someone is here. I'll pick up the money at ten thirty, and we did like a fifty fifty split. So after like two weeks of like the nude modeling and the massages in the hotel room, which by the way, it was usually actually massages. Yeah, it's just like lonely dudes. So it was actually like pretty cool. So the nude modeling thing was the was there a product associated with that? So we're taking pictures of you for posters, we're taking pictures uh painters are So there's a lot of photographers who do pictures that they think they can sell to a magazine, porno mag or anything. And in my mind the time, nobody actually looks at porn. So I'm never going to get caught doing this because I didn't look at porn. The guy I was dating, I believed it didn't look at porn. So you weren't draped over a nicely covered couch with grapes in your hand. You know, the person is already in the hotel or you're in the room and they come to you. My girl calls me, hey, your name is Candy Berryes coming up in ten minutes. So the guy comes in the room, and what happens. He takes all his clothes off. She was very clear about the order of operations. So you know, he has to put the money on the nights to first, and then he can take his clothes off because the cops never gonna just like put money down. So if he doesn't put money down, run for your life. All right, all right? Did you ask her Steven would be like where the fire escape? She didn't. Not do you ever at any point ask her like, why why are we afraid of cops? It's just a massage? No, that made sense? Yeah, okay. I was like, I think this is illegal. This is probably illegal, but like that just made it more exciting. I was here for the adventure. So now these guys showed up from massages. Nobody tried to fuck you, Nobody tried to suck me, like, absolutely nobody. Yeah. It wasn't until I started doing house calls that that changed. So in call versus outcol So, somebody calls, I want a massage at my house, and she said, okay, well it works out all right. He showed you the house and then what happens in and then all that all bets are off, like they'll offer more money for additional services. So my girl had a really smart that. I think it's really smart. I mean she's the only pimp I've ever worked with, you know, which is she would only send me to places where I was with somebody else. So it was like two girls that were ordered. So they asked for two girls yea with other girls willing to have sex or not. Oh yeah, okay, so you almost always the other girl was willing to have sucks and like down like they were down to fuck because then they got more money. I was like, I think, God, I can't go that far because God won't forgive me. So you were sitting there as you're screwing or you're like, it's okay, I did the massage. I'll just sit out here and wait for you. Guys know I watched okay, so you're there, okay. I mean usually I would like fondle somebody, you know, I would like massage somebody, fondle somebody, you know, like, hey, can you play with her? Tiths? Sure? You know that will be an extra. That was my question, and so how much how much money are you pulling now from So between those two things, nude modeling was like four hundred a day and it was kind of like six hour days, a lot of standing around and being cold, which is, you know, kind of boring. And then the like face to face was much more exciting because you're seeing this whole as as a Mormon turned thrown into the sex world's human I was like, holy sh it, you know, this is so insane. This is like what movies are about. I didn't think this was real, you know. And so I would make a lot of cash between the hotel rooms and the massages and the calls I would make. At the beginning, I only did hotel rooms, so I would make about eight hundred two thousand a day if I did like a full day sitting in a hotel room. The new modeling like four D. So she meets this photographer Mike Square. Guy takes a lot of photos of her. But one day Mike has gotta problem. He's taking too many photos of her and overexposure is an issue, and he's like, you know, but what you could do is porn. And by the way, it pays a lot better, and I was like, wow, isn't that kind of what I'm already doing. So he introduced his ma to Jim South. I don't know who Jim South is. He's a legend, but at the time, I'm like, oh, hi, Jim. You know, small man in a cowboy hut and he's in this office off of Van Eyes that's like dirty and like kind of dusty and kind of musty and gross, and so I don't think of him as this like, you know, epic legend who like starts all these careers. To me, Poorma is not a career. It was like a gateway to be able to do the thing I really wanted to do. And I'm still like undecided on like the porn thing. I'm like, well, go meet Jim, but I don't know if I'm going to have sex with anyone important. Like that actually sounded so insane that it like made me really excited that it was an adventure. And um So I meet Jim and Jim tells me, well, you know there's this guy named um At Powers. Yeah, and I'm like, okay, And what I don't tell Jim, And what I hadn't told Mike, because I thought that they wouldn't want to book me is that I'm still a virgin, Like I'm still a virgin, but I'm also a sex worker. So that's a weird mix, right. I don't tell them that, But I really liked the idea that Ed was nice. He was nice, he wasn't going to be aggressive. And there's another woman in the office at that time, and she turns around and she's like, Jim's the best. He will never put you in a compromise situation. So already this girl who's sitting in the office is like, I'm vouching for this guy, Like he's the real deal, Like he won't put you in a bad situation. Which is what I really liked about my girl. She always made sure that we were we were safe. I got really lucky in that sense because I wasn't fucked with that, I wasn't raped, and I had a lot of fun being an adult entertainment actress. Anyway, So you go over to its place and he has this fancy house in Calabasas. Couldn't be nicer. I like, comes to the door, So are you going with the understanding? Like, Oh, I'm just gonna meet this guy or do you know now? I'm like, I'm going to do this alright, and so my my stomach is like churning. I like, see the big mansion. I'm like, oh, ship, like this is happening, and so what you like one or I think I was still nineteen. It's like right after my twentieth birthday, alright, yeah, I mean six months later I went to an adult entertainment event that I couldn't get into at a club because I wasn't twenty one to drink, all right, So so you show him it has He's got this mansion and he's nice, super nice. He asked me a bunch of questions. He could like, tell me about you. He loves the fact that I have a Mormon boyfriend, so we talked about that and then he could tell he was super nervous. So he's like really gentle, really nice, really kind. He was. He's just like very you just felt like what you were getting was very authentic, and he was. And then he paid me with a check and he had to be like, oh, what's your real name again? To Candy. Well, Mike and I had decided that my name would be Wendy, So my poor name was Wendy James. Yeah, Wendy James. She is a singer as well. Yeah I now know that, but I didn't at the time, and so, you know, he said, you know, you've got that Peter Pan thing, that like forever youth thing going on, so you should be Wendy. But I was there for probably like an hour and a half, two hours, and I walk out with fifteen hundred bucks, So I'm like, fuck, yeah, I can pay like six months rent with this thing. Like I'm on my way to my fifty grand. Now, given that this was your first time, that people have all this kind of um not necessarily romantic attached, but significant attachment to their first time, how did this How did this feel as the first time? Was it more or less than what you had expected before? I'm trying to get a fix in your frame of mind issue as you leave. It really wasn't about this, So it was about the money. So I like took myself to Starbucks, got a vanilla frappuccino. Look at my phone, which by now I have a new phone, and there's like five missed voicemails from Jim that are like, Wendy, everybody wants to book you and on the basis, off the basis of the new modeling pictures, they see this like fresh faced, chair up looking girl. You know, I've got that girl next door look. And and then it's just like off to the races. Like every place that I want on an audition for there was a two side a piece of paper that said what you were willing to do, like, do you do like double penetration? Nope? Do you do anal nope? Do you do lesbian? Great? It was fun, Like I'm I met so many fun people, Like it was fun and the people were really nice to me. Do you have time left over to actually go on auditions for non adult rules? Yeah? Like I still every Wednesday. I reserved Wednesday to be on the extra on Judge Juty Judge Show Brown, and I kept that because it was my perfect cover. When I went to church on Sundays, people would be like, oh, I saw you on Judge Duty perfect. You can see I am a struggling actress exactly how I want you to think. You know, my boyfriend, Oh I saw you on Judge Judy. Oh perfect. I was like living a double life, like I was trying my best to live a double life. The dude in d C. Four months into the porn I'm like, look, this is what's going on. I'm probably like I'm really enjoying this life. I don't think I'm actually Mormon anymore. And for him, he like ran the other direction, which like this is antithetical to everything. He believes that when you said you told him you're not you don't think you're into do you tell them about the movies or now? I casually mentioned that maybe I had done an adults entertainment Yeah. I did not say porn. I did not say sex work. I said adult entertainment. Did he get angry or was he just upset? Oh? I mean he was heartbroken. Yeah, And like what would you feel if you'd believe this person you were in love with has been betraying you and lying to you for the past like four months. Like that's shitty because on the side, we were talking about how we were going to get married. Shitty. Yeah, it's a shitty way to treat someone. But also I was over the church, Like by that point I was like, you know, I don't think this is really so then I live in my best life for a good like four months. Call girling. I'm going on cool gigs, and I wasn't really auditioning for real movies anymore because that was what I was going to do. After I'd made all my cash and going on set. Suddenly I'm like known as like a rising starlet in the porn world, which is crazy, you know, not now if if this were some other podcasts and some other interview this is the point at which the interviewer gets his tone in their voice where they indicate that they feel fucking sorry for you. There's somehow that this is somehow a deviation, a deviation from the normal, that is somehow sad. But it doesn't sound at all to me like that jibs with the reality that you're spelling out. And most people would say they imagine life working as a point star and a call girl would be miserable, But it doesn't sound like that was your experience. It was fantastic, and for me it was quite autonomous. For the first time in my life, I'm making my own money, like real fucking money, Like this is not like Nordstrom commission money where you got like a thousand bucks a month. Like this is like you're bringing in like two granded day cool, and if you're disciplined enough to like put it away, that adds up really fast. I mean it got to the point where I couldn't like go to the bank and look at the teller anymore because they look at me suspiciously. What do you what do you say to those people that who say, like this is degrading and that this is not something that should and I don't want to minimize I don't want to minimize that that argument as well. I mean for me, I didn't know enough to like think of myself as like an empowered sex worker, right, Like I think if you talked to there's a famous author named D'Antonio Crane, and there are all these you know, Stormy Daniels is a great example. I mean, she's an American hero at one, but also she's a woman who was like, she is a sex worker, and she is loud and proud about being a sex worker. I was never that, So I want to be clear about that. I was never loud and proud. I was always lying about it. There was never a time when I was fully honest with anyone about the fact that I was doing it, because I clearly, like felt some shame about it even after I stopped being Mormon, so I didn't think of myself that way. But it was the first time in my life that I thought of myself as the owner of my own body. And like, you know, nobody told me what they are going to do to my body. They always asked on a piece of paper, what are we? What are where are your boundaries? And that's what I loved about porn, as everything was so upfront. Yes, this is a transaction, Yes this is for money. Yes we will be trading sex, but I would need to know where your boundaries are. And porn is highly regulated, so like you do your HIV test every thirty days, and you show your piece of paper to the other actor, and if they don't have your paper their paper, you are not having sex with them. And growing up religious, I never thought of my body really is mine. I thought of it as a tool to like have children with and something really to be ashamed of. And so then I'm like immersed in this world. It's telling me not only as your body yours, but also you can like very utilitarian lie like make money with it, and also it's something to be celebrated so much so that we're going to sell this, you know, like, and so that was all like very new and exciting for me. And so now I'm making really good cash, but I have to make it seem like I'm still a starving artist, right, So I'm like playing at being I'm like acting in my real life at being a starving artist, which I'm not anymore. I have like a ton of cash and I'm just like putting into the bank and I'm like, you're actually being good about that, because you're not. I was great about that. Yes, I didn't get into drugs until I'm at a dude, and then that's kind of where the fun ended. You paid attention at all. The narrative is usually things start going wrong and then you get into porn. An actual fact, porn was a high point and they didn't start going wrong for Amy until after she left porn. The bad Boyfriend, the drugs hashtag it all. So I meet this dude, and I meet him as a call girl. He's like one of my clients, and I fall in love with him, and maybe more than falling in love with him, I fall in love with his math. As soon as I move in with him. It's abusive. He's in the middle of a divorce, and so I get in my car, I drive away. I'm like, fuck you, I'm not moving in after all, and he does the thing right. I'm so sorry, baby. It will never happen again. Oh my god, I can't believe that happened. It's because of my divorce and all of the stress of my divorce. I go back that night. I go back over and over and over. We do math all night long. We fight all the time. It's kind of exciting. So now what what a folks going back home at this point anything. My sister actually moved to see me Valley. She moves in with me and Manny this guy who is abusive. Why did she do this? Because I won't leave him, like I keep not leaving him. So she moves out specifically to help you leave him or yea, and she had to as a plan, We're going to run away in the middle of the night. She finds a place for us to live, like secretly, and then in the middle of the night she has this backpacked for us and we run away like sleeping or he's not there. He's sleeping, but he's not sleeping. That hard because five minutes after we walk out the front door and start walking down the street. I can hear his car and he had a link in with like a really high cylinder engine. And so when he starts his card and know what that sounds like, and I'm like, oh fuck, that's manny. We run down the street. We hide in the bushes of this graveyard that's like behind the house that we were living in. And it's like straight out of like a movie, Like we're like hiding from this guy. And he's texting me every two minutes, you piece of ship. What are you doing. I'm gonna find you. I'm going to kill you. Yeah. We try to get a restraining order. It's not enough that he's made these threats over text message. And she literally saved my life and and we just we go back to being waitresses together. And I lived with my sister and the dude slowly fades away exactly and um, and then I read Build My Life. So I went to community college. It took me like six years to finish a two year degree like get my a. A took six years, and I m transferred to Berkeley. So I got into UC Berkeley good enough to get into Berkeley exactly did when did you meet your husband? I met my husband. Um, after I graduated from Berkeley. I was in Portland, Oregon working as an ELSAT tutor, So I was tutoring ELSA. I was a personal trainer on the side, and uh, and I was just like taking that gap year between undergrad and law school. You know, I didn't want to meet anyone before law school because I wanted to be able to focus. But I meet Keith, and it was just like love at first sight situation, and it wasn't even a choice. It's like, this is the person I'm going to spend my life with. And you know, right now, I I run two pole dance studios and I'm an attorney, so you know, on the weekends, I do like credible fear interviews for immigrants who are trying to come to the United States. And then immigration law is one that I've recently become interested in because of the human rights violations that United States government is involved in in terms of how we're separating children from their families and and we actually don't have a process for reuniting those children. And there's just an article about how, um, you know, all these parents were sent back to Guatemala their children are still here living in foster families. That's crazy. So immigration law is not my specialty, but I've gotten really into it in the past year. So I run businesses by day, and I, you know, create pole dance art, which is kind of weird and underground to most people, even though it's what I see every day and um and do law on the weekends. And that's kind of how I like to live my life. Okay, So if you're not, you're not stuck in some corporate law thing where you've got billable hours to be with or no. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean I meet a lot of those people. I know a lot of those people. It's really shaped the way that I think about my body now, which is just a tool. And you know, my my creative work as a pole dancer and a competitive pole dancer now is really around like creating art with my body. And I'm not sure I would have ever, um not, had had not had this shame to be able to do that if it hadn't been for becoming a sex worker so long ago. And I wish that I had had a place that was so full of like female empowerment and like women celebrating other women, and you know, moving to l A and having my formative growing up years be like women competing with other women for roles or whatever, um, and only finding that real like support in the adult entertainment industry um, and then having that taken from me because I made a poor relationship decision. UM. Like I wish I had had spaces like this that we're safe spaces to express sexuality. And so that's why they're so important to me and why I create them today, and so I want to keep doing this. If you could tell your younger self something, what would you tell your younger self? I think it would be the opposite of what you would expect, which is for the for the ten years after I got out of porn, I didn't talk about my story. I told myself that it was something to be ashamed of, and and the world around me told me the same thing too. Write like when people who when I was a waitress men would recognize me, and then they would use the fact that they recognized me against me. They'd like wait for me in the parking lot and be like, I know your secret, you know, if we don't fuck whatever, Da da da. And it was to the point where I had somebody escort me to my car, and I wish that I had just owned my story earlier, Like I wish that, you know, I'm really proud of, Like, looking back, I'm really proud of how like resourceful I was. You know, I arrived in Los Angeles with nothing, then I found Rick and you know, and then I just let myself be open to the universe in a way that the universe actually really did take care of me. And I'm a really big believer in like having a life that's not so stringently planned that like you let the world happen to you versus like trying to control everything. And um, and I wish I hadn't spent so much time feeling shame for something that's actually like a really exciting cool thing looking back on it now. It wasn't until about five year US ago when I'm living here, so a decade in um San Francisco, So about a decade after all of this story is over, that my fam texts me and she says, Hey, Amy, who's Wendy James. And I'm like, oh, betch, You're gonna need to sit down for this one. If your adventure high point hits when you're twenty and you're thirty five. Now looking back on greatness, can you square yourself going forward with a life that you expect won't be nearly as adventurous. I don't know. I don't know, but Bond Amy Bond, I guess she's geared to find out, and so are we. Azzy Confidential Ozzy Confidential is produced by who ELL's me Eugeneus Robinson, executive produced by Rob Coolo's and mixed and engineered by Nick Johanson. And For more Azi Confidential go to o z y dot com, slash Confidential, Hush Hush