Camgirl

  This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book

  Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Isabella Mazzei

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book

  or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.

  For more information, address:

  Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  Set in Warnock

  epub isbn: 9781644281062

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mazzei, Isa, author.

  Title: Camgirl / by Isa Mazzei.

  Description: Los Angeles, CA : Rare Bird Books, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019012248 | ISBN 9781644280355 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mazzei, Isa. | Internet pornography—United States. | Internet personalities—United States—Biography. | Webcasting—United States. | Sex oriented businesses—United States.

  Classification: LCC HQ472.U6 M39 2019 | DDC 306.77/102854678—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012248

  For all my friends:

  online and off.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Rooms On Fire

  Girls Chase Boys

  Most Girls

  Million Dollar Man

  Say My Name

  Good As Hell

  Dance, Dance, Dance

  Can’t Be Tamed

  Paris is Burning

  Modern Girl

  Girls Just Want To Have Fun

  If This Was a Movie

  Glamorous

  Hidden Place

  Green Light

  …Baby One More Time

  21 Things I Want in a Lover

  Psychobabble

  Prom Queen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Trigger warning: alcoholism, mental illness, suicide,

  self-harm, sexual violence

  Prologue

  I was about to hit the countdown. My overly lit, overly made-up face blinked at the thousands of people watching my video stream. My giant desktop computer was on the carpet and I was on my knees, a glass of wine on one side of me, the Bible on the other. I’d been sober for nearly two years, but now I was drunk. Behind me, Jesus smiled garishly in a framed picture. He wore red robes and pulled open his chest to reveal a heart entwined with thorns.

  I was naked. My ass hurt from bruises and burns. This was it—my moment. My grand artistic statement. The internet was going to tip me to kill myself. I wasn’t actually going to die, but that wasn’t the point. They thought they were killing me. Really, they were going to kill Una, my online persona. Once she was dead, Isa would be reborn.

  In the past two years I had amassed thousands of viewers, thousands of followers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’d ranked among the top fifty camgirls on a site that boasted tens of thousands of performers. I had everything I wanted even before I knew I wanted it—a brand-new apartment, two BMWs, endless eggs Benedict, and a manicurist on-call.

  Earlier that day I had taken a scalding shower. I waxed, shaved, tweezed, and exfoliated until my skin was raw. I stacked candles on a shelf against the wall: tea candles, pillar candles, cheap candles from the clearance section of Target that smelled vaguely like Christmas. Every light bulb in the room glowed red. In an impulsive moment, I scrawled “COMMIT” across the wall in red lipstick.

  It was melodramatic. Indulgent. Sexy.

  The show was part suicide note and part eulogy for Una, the girl my cam room had come to know and love.

  My viewers were curious, impatient. They peppered the chat room with questions. Now that I was naked, what was next? Would I pour hot wax on my body? Burn my hands on the flames? Burn the Bible?

  I looked again at the word: “COMMIT.” Everything I had worked for built up to this: my final show. I sat poised over a dildo I had stuck in the middle of a cross, ready to fuck my way to fame. I tried to focus. I felt hot, dizzy. The air was thick with sweat and pain and promise.

  Una was my everything. My home. My lover. My sense of purpose. She gave me money. She gave me validation. She gave me power and taught me hope and accepted me exactly as I was. Una was the keeper of my shame, my pride. She was there when I was lonely, when I was sad, when I was bored, when I needed a friend. Una was always just a click away.

  And I was about to kill her.

  Rooms On Fire

  We want cow! We want cow!” A large group of angry elementary students marched in a wide circle around the perimeter of the playground. “We want cow!” Tiny fists punched the air demanding justice. Their goal? Freedom from the tyranny imposed by a principal who allowed only an eagle, a prairie dog, or an elk to be considered for school mascot.

  Their method: A school-wide walkout, replete with signs and chants.

  Their leader: A skinny eight-year-old with a megaphone and a penchant for political unrest—me.

  “WE WANT COW!” I demanded through the megaphone I had obtained by bribing my babysitter.

  Even then, I knew I was destined to be famous. A famous activist, a famous singer. A famous anything. I needed to be the center of attention. Preferably, I wanted all eyes on me in shock and awe as I did something surprising: like calling out my teachers for their grammatical mistakes or convincing my entire class to drop their pencils mid-math class and stomp around outside in defense of freedom.

  “We want cow!” we shouted.

  My teacher followed us into the yard, flanked by several students who had been too scared to walk out but wanted to participate now that they saw how cool we looked. I handed them the signs my friend Amy and I had made in the bathroom with stolen art supplies.

  “We want cow! We want cow!”

  I walked up and down the line of marching students, urging them to shout louder, stomp harder, wave their signs as high as they could. We made our way to the edge of the playground and circled back toward the building, completing a full circle of the schoolyard. A cluster of teachers gathered near the door, and our gym teacher blew her whistle in an ineffective attempt to gain our attention.

  My friend Sean’s eyes wandered over to where teachers stood with their arms crossed. His sign quivered.

  “WE WANT COW!” I reminded him. I jumped up on a tree stump and raised my arms. “This is our school! We should get to choose our mascot!”

  The crowd cheered. I cheered.

  I jumped down and joined the front of the march.

  “What do we want?”

  “COW!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “NOW!”

  “What do we want?”

  As we approached the building, the principal made her way to the yard. Her eyes locked onto me, and she walked briskly toward the group, waving at the gym teacher to stop blowing uselessly on her whistle.

  She blocked the group’s forward progress with her body. “What’s going on here?”

  “We refuse to go back to class until our demands are met,” I said, using my best adult voice.

  “What demands? What does cow mean?”

  “You know what it means, Debra.” I crossed my arms, daring her to challenge me.

  Sean gasped. Amy shrieked in delight.

  Debra knew what we wanted. My four prior meetings in her office had outlined our simple, reasonable ask: a ballot box for c
ow so that students could cast a vote for what they actually wanted. Prairie dogs and eagles were boring. Cows were cool. Cows were the trendy animal of the fifth grade.

  “What did you call me?”

  “Do you want to meet to negotiate our terms? Our demands are small, Debra.”

  “I will not negotiate with you.”

  I stood my ground.

  She grabbed my arm.

  I swung around and blasted her right in the face with the megaphone.

  “WE WANT COW!” I screamed, as loud as I could. She didn’t even wince. “WE WANT COW!”

  She pulled the megaphone from my hands and grabbed my shoulder, pushing me toward the building.

  “Don’t give up! Don’t go back!” I screamed over my shoulder. “What do we want?”

  “COW!”

  Our gym teacher held open the door as Principal Debra pushed me inside. I held the door frame and stuck my head back out.

  “When do we want it?”

  “NO—” Their voices were muted by the heavy door slamming shut behind us. The teachers rushed forward to break up the group, who continued to jump and cheer. Debra walked me down the hallway, steering me toward her office at the front of the school.

  Face burning, chin high, I walked down the hallway a Goddamn martyr.

  ×××

  There is only one photo from my parents’ wedding. In the picture my mom is six months pregnant with me, and my dad is in a gray suit. Behind both their eyes, you can already see the first hints of panic setting in. My mom claims she never considered aborting me, though she’s always joked that she should have abandoned me at the fire station. No one knows if my sister Lucy was planned or not, but she came two and a half years later.

  I was born in Santa Monica, California. My parents had thrown themselves into “making it” in Hollywood in the late eighties and had spent the years leading up to my birth working as assistants on film sets and saving pennies for bus fare. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. I slept on a mattress in the kitchen/living room/dining room, and my sister slept in a crib next to my parents’ bed.

  I was three and my parents were just beginning to make it in their careers when an earthquake and subsequent wildfire tore through the San Fernando Valley. We almost lost our house, my mom lost her nerve, and we moved to Boulder, Colorado, a town renowned for its liberalism, used bookstores, and having the most PhDs per capita––a bastion of suburban wine moms, white supremacy, and ninety-dollar yoga pants.

  Shortly after our move, my parents began to make money. Real, actual money. My dad, a cinematographer, booked more and more commercial gigs with famous actors, and my mom, a makeup artist, racked up celebrity clients she could name-drop at parties. My parents wanted to see their newfound success reflected in my sister and me having a picture-perfect childhood—the kind that comes with culs-de-sac and bike rides to school. Living in Boulder meant that my parents (mostly my dad) had to travel around the world to work, shooting ads, music videos, and those hilarious Extra: Polar Ice gum commercials I liked to quote at recess.

  I was as much of a wealthy, white, privileged, overindulged, granola-fed child as anyone else in Boulder. We had money. If you’re offended by me talking about how much money I grew up with, rest assured: all that cash evaporated sometime around my seventeenth birthday, when my parents got divorced. Yes, I grew up with money. But a “normal, upper-middle class amount” of money, as my mom liked to assure us. She reminded us that we had a housekeeper and a gardener and nannies but, like, they didn’t live with us or anything. We didn’t even have a guesthouse and our pool was shared by the entire neighborhood.

  When we first moved to Boulder, we lived in a very ordinary single-family home with a finished basement and a swing set in the yard. But that was only temporary while my parents bought and renovated a much larger, grander house. The new house had five stories, but only a couple rooms per floor. It was dizzying. There were other questionable design decisions, like the plastic, transparent blue wall in my parents’ bedroom and the bright red wall in the living room that reminded me of the elevators in The Shining.

  Our house was circled on three sides by a small, charming creek full of transparent spiders and little crawdaddies that my sister and I thought might burrow into our flesh, but that did little to deter us from swimming in it anyway.

  “They’ll lay eggs in your stomach,” I explained to Lucy. “And then their babies will burst out of your eyes.”

  My sister enjoyed getting revenge by scaring me back. She saw a lot of ghosts. I tried to get her to tell me who they were and what they wanted, but she ignored me. “You can get in through the basement window, if you want,” she’d tell them. “But don’t go in the crawl space—there are spiders there.”

  My parents were anything but normal parents. My father was tall, handsome, Italian, and one time shot a music video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. While other people’s dads wore socks with sandals, mine wore Prada sneakers. In the late 2000s, he shot a video for P!nk and came home with bleached tips. And he rocked those bleached tips. My friends called him “hot dad” and always asked if he’d be home when they came over. He was cool with weed and cool with boys, and I never had a curfew. He was the one who let us stay up late and who drove us to get slushies at 7-Eleven on Christmas Eve. When we spent our summers in Italy with his family, he’d hunt octopus with his bare hands and freak us out by slurping the tentacles at dinner. He was always telling us not to be afraid of life, and often said things like, “Don’t worry, it’s probably not poisonous,” and “You’re not gonna drown—most likely.”

  He got to leave town for weeks on end, and when he returned, he brought exotic gifts like carved animal statues from South Africa and ruby and pearl necklaces from India. I bragged about my dad’s job frequently. I bragged about the time he got to meet Hilary Duff. I bragged about the signed CDs he brought me. I bragged that in my family we fast-forwarded the Super Bowl because my dad had to study the commercials.

  My dad was quick to suggest adventures, sometimes at all hours.

  “Do you girls want to drive into the mountains and watch the meteor shower?”

  “I’m buying us tickets to Costa Rica!”

  He once picked us up at school with a designer puppy—a mini American Eskimo I named Steinbeck.

  My dad also had a habit of disappearing into the basement and refusing to come out for days, which we later learned was a symptom of his then undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Back then, we just called it “Daddy’s not feeling well.” He’d burrow into the guest bed and hide his face. I remember it was like watching a small child take my dad’s place. It’d start with his voice getting soft and distant. We’d ask him if he was okay, and he’d sort of murmur, “Leave me alone.” Then he would stop responding completely. My sister and I would take shifts tiptoeing downstairs every few hours to check that he was still alive. We developed a routine sometime around middle school. My sister would lean over the side of the bed and hold her ear close to his face.

  “Still breathing,” she’d mouth.

  “Dad?” I’d ask, as quietly as possible. “Do you want some tea?”

  He wouldn’t move.

  “Dad?” Lucy would repeat, louder.

  “Shut up!” I’d hiss, not wanting her to make him angry. Then we’d give up and go upstairs to my mother.

  “Girls, leave your father alone,” she’d scold. “He’s too selfish to pay attention to you.”

  My mother was an upbeat, loquacious woman with a wide circle of friends and a talent for making anyone feel special. She drove a dark BMW, wore designer heels, had perfectly manicured nails, and maintained a BMI of exactly eighteen. Her friends called her “Hollywood” because of the celebrities she worked with as a makeup artist. She was friends with Sting and Robin Williams, and one time, when I was in the seventh grade, Justin Timberlake kissed her at a party on Paul Allen�
��s yacht. She collected famous friends and rich friends and had a horde of admirers young and old wherever she went.

  She enjoyed pretending to be Italian, and my father’s Italian last name was probably the only thing she liked about him. My mom studied Italian, dressed Italian, and peppered her language with clever little hints—using words like “ciao” and “baci” and insisting on kissing both cheeks whenever she met someone. She spoke often about how much she missed Italy, and slowly but surely everyone in her social circle began to assume that she, like my father, was Italian. While she never outright lied about it, she had a particular kind of smile when someone introduced her as “Marilyn, from Florence,” to which she would always reply, “Ah, you mean Firenze.”

  My mother never shared much about her actual identity, and we never met her side of the family. Over the years, my sister and I tried to pry facts from her—sometimes for a school-mandated family tree, sometimes to satisfy our own burning curiosity. We once learned that she was very poor growing up and that sometimes her family would eat flour cooked in oil when there wasn’t enough food. We pictured her huddled around a lone burner, in a straw shack with a dirt floor. We were fascinated, and we pestered her with questions.

  “What’s your mother like? Where are you from? How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “Too many.”

  “Yes, but how many?”

  “Too many.”

  “Mom, I need to know how many for the family tree I’m making.”

  A sigh. An eye roll. “Eleven.”

  “ELEVEN?!”

  “I think…”

  Any truth of her past was invisible to those outside the family. She waltzed around the world as a glamorous, beautiful, vague Italian. To us, however, cracks gradually appeared, deepened, and finally split open. Yes, she was super cool and beautiful and loved us a lot, but she would also sometimes get drunk and rip the paintings off the walls and cover the stairs with shattered glass. She mixed her Xanax with her wine, locked herself out of her bedroom naked, and then attempted to scale the side of our house with a ladder to break back in. She once went to the same rehab as Lindsay Lohan, but she’s not supposed to talk about it. She “accidentally” overdosed while traveling in Italy. I was sixteen, at home with my sister, when my dad called from California to tell us.