Camgirl

By Isa Mazzei

Isa Mazzei's film version of her experience as a camgirl came out on Netflix in 2017 as the movie Cam starring Orange is the New Black's Madeline Brewer

The film got big publicity, including through The New York Times, Vulture, Cosmopolitan, Wired, Buzzfeed, The Verge, and more

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rare Bird Books
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644281062

Book preview

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 cow 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.

Your mother’s in the hospital. She overdosed on Valium.

Oh.

She was in a coma for three days. She’s awake now.

A what?

A coma. She’s awake. They didn’t call me until now.

Are you gonna go there?

Her flight back is Tuesday, by the time I got there…

Okay.

My parents had little in common, but trying to kill them-selves was really the glue that held our family together.

After my dad hung up, I turned to my sister. Mom was in a coma for three days, apparently, but now she’s awake.

A coma? Why?

She took too much Valium.

Oh.

We stood in silence for a moment.

Should we text her? Lucy ventured.

You can.

She might get mad at us. If she knows we know.

So don’t text her then.

My parents slept in separate bedrooms, led separate lives, and had separate interests, which left Lucy and I separate from them too. They gave my sister and I all the freedom we could ever desire, and then some. In the face of neglect, I became a hyperactive monster who sparred with principals and stirred up drama. My sister, on the other hand, became sullen and sarcastic. Often, we would find ourselves in a seemingly empty house, my mother locked away in her tower (as my father called the top-floor master suite) and my father locked away in his office (as my mom called his basement-level bedroom). We talked to each through an intercom system on the phone.

My mom rang down.

What are you girls doing?

"Watching Daria," my sister answered, munching on chips.

You’ve been watching TV all day, go do something else.

Okay. Lucy hung up the phone and unmuted the TV. My mom called back a moment later.

Are you still watching TV?

Yes.

Okay. Well, watch TV until your eyes bleed then. I don’t care.

Okay, thanks. Bye. My sister hung up the phone.

As a family, we didn’t do much together. When my dad was in town, he made us eat dinner in a charade of togetherness. When he was working, my mom bought us takeout and we ate silently in front of the television. My parents showed one another little to no physical affection. I only saw them kiss once, and that was after my sister and I forced them by chanting Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! from the back seat of the car. It took fifteen minutes of nonstop screaming before we got so much as a peck.

Twice a month, we’d make time for family game night. We played two games. The first was called criticize the show/commercial/news broadcast. In that game, my mom would shriek any time she noticed a bad wig or foundation that didn’t match the actor’s neck or if someone had accidentally cast an ugly person in a sitcom. My dad pointed out any time the lighting equipment reflected in someone’s pupil or when a night scene was obviously shot in the day with a bad filter. My sister and I tried to beat them to the punch, sometimes pretending we could see a light even when we couldn’t.

The other game was called go into the bathroom and discuss Mom’s alcoholism. I’m not really sure why these conversations always took place in the bathroom, but I think it’s because my dad wanted a place where we were all trapped and couldn’t leave. After any particularly bad episode, my sister, mother, and I preferred to sweep up the glass, apologize to the cops, pay some sort of civic fine, and spend the next seventeen days refusing to make eye contact. Then my dad would come home, discover that a $5,000 piece of art had been donated to the city dump and summon us to The Lavatory for A Conference. They all went something like:

Your mother needs to go to rehab.

My sister and I would mumble in agreement.

We need to support her while she gets better.

My sister and I would roll our eyes at the concept of familial support.

She’s sick. You understand that, right?

We’d nod.

Marilyn, CAN YOU PLEASE TALK TO YOUR CHILDREN?

My mother would raise her head up halfway from where she was seated on the toilet lid, still in the nightgown she’d been wearing for days. She’d push her hair behind her ears, place her hands in prayer pose.

Hmm? Yes. I really just need to recenter myself.

While my mom did attend rehab a couple times, and even said once that she had an allergy to alcohol, she never committed to sobriety. She did manage, however, to get better at hiding her drinking from my father by only doing it while he was out of town for work. Without proper adult supervision, she was free to wreak havoc on our house. And on our social lives. Like the time I came home with some friends and she was doing yoga in the living room wearing only sheer tights and a bra.

"Come join me, girls," she slurred, breathlessly. She was on her back, her legs spread open wide, sheer polyester the only thing between my friends’ eyes and my mom’s vagina.

Legs up the wall is really good for you, really important…inverts your energy.

Sometimes these episodes would end with me or my sister calling the cops, but only when my mother was threatening to kill herself or had decided that driving was a good idea.

I enjoyed when the cops came. They were so very concerned for our wellbeing. Since my sister didn’t like to talk to them, I naturally became the center of attention.

Does your mother ever hit you?

Well…

Isa! my sister would hiss.

No. She doesn’t.

Does she drink often?

"Well, she’s an alcoholic, I’d state, matter-of-factly. So yes."

After the cops left, convinced that my mother was stable and in fact only moderately drunk, she would turn on us.

So help me God…

Mom, we’re sorry—we were scared! Lucy would try explaining.

Bullshit. You’re a liar. Out to ruin my life.

Mom, please.

Go tattle to your father, why don’t you? She’d stumble upstairs to her room. "I know you both love him best. But where is he? Huh? Where is he?"

Mom…

"Galavanting around with his whores—that’s where. I’m raising you. This is the thanks I get?" She’d slam her door and turn the lock violently.

I don’t know why you even bother talking to her, I’d tell Lucy. You’re wasting your time.

If we didn’t call the cops, we’d call whomever her best friend was at the time, who would rush over quickly and try to shelter us.

"Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll take care of everything," the best friend would croon.

I’d repeat my mantra: She’s an alcoholic. You can’t fix anything. Just make sure she doesn’t die.

There’s no need to be dramatic, the best friend always assured us, tapping gently on my mother’s door. Marilyn, Marilyn can you open up? It’s me.

She said she has razor blades, Lucy would offer helpfully.

After a binge, my mom wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days, until she’d suddenly appear downstairs, dressed, made-up, asking us why Rosa hadn’t vacuumed the living room, and why no one had brought in her package from Neiman Marcus. And then she’d disown whatever friend we had brought in to help her.

Oh, Nancy? she’d say, when asked why we never saw her friend anymore. She turned out to be a raging bitch. They all do.

When my mother was drunk, I couldn’t leave because I was terrified that she would die, and I couldn’t really stay because I was terrified that she would accidentally kill us. When I was younger, I would hide with my sister under her loft bed and we’d play pretend games with our stuffed animals. Neither of us really wanted to play, but we’d move the animals around and make them talk to each other, acting like we weren’t straining to hear my mother’s footsteps as she wandered drunkenly around the house.

What’s your bear do?

He’s an astronaut.

Okay, mine is the scientist, let’s say.

Okay.

Hi, Mr. Bear. Please, let’s go to Pluto.

He wouldn’t go to Pluto.

Why not?

Because that’s a stupid planet.

I was leading two lives. On the one hand, I was a girl whose parents knew celebrities and who got to visit film sets. I flew first class to Europe and gave my friends autographed Destiny’s Child posters for their birthdays. On the other hand, I was a girl whose parents were so crippled by their own mental illnesses that they nearly abandoned her. I felt these two halves of myself begin to polarize. There was the me that wanted to be rich and glamorous like my parents, and there was the me that wanted to murder my family and burn down the world.

Since love and attention from my parents were sporadic and infrequent gifts, I learned to seek them elsewhere. Without a sense of belonging even in my own family, the role of outcast came naturally, and I began to revel in the opportunities it presented. If I was going to be a weird girl with a tragic family, I was going to be the weirdest girl with the most tragic family.

That was, after all, a great way to get attention.

Girls Chase Boys

He nceforth I walk the Wiccan path, I chanted. I dedicate myself to you, Mother Goddess, and you, Father God." I raised the candle I had lit, letting the burning wax run down my hands. What was dedication if not pain, after all?

I needed to stand out, be different, turn heads when I walked down the hallway. The easiest way to do this, it seemed, was to make sure I was the strangest girl in middle school. At age twelve, I decided this meant I should appropriate a pagan religion I didn’t understand at all, and so I dove headfirst into my Wiccan phase. I was obsessed with

Reviews for Camgirl

[lesindy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a fun, debauched book. Isa is deeply troubled, and I thought she'd find a way to find out who she really is through camming. She made bank and had fun at first, but it got to be a real job and repetitive. The convention sounded gross, and the ending of the book was a real downer. Also, all the other camgirls she met sounded like they were bored of their work too. XD