Out of Bondage Read Online Free Page A

gave me courage. It was a courage that seemed to translate into energy. It enabled me to get up and do things. It gave me so much false confidence that pretty soon I took to hiding behind it. And without it, I was scared, scared of everything, scared of being alone. With cocaine, the people around me seemed to be my friends; not true friends, but at least there were bodies around me and I wasn’t alone.
    Cocaine was just coming into its own in Hollywood. Some of the flunkies at Hefner’s had discovered they could seduce young girls by using cocaine as bait. The way they would use it was to put it into an emptied neosynepherine bottle along with water. Then while they were watching the movie, they’d give themselves a squirt in the nose every now and then. Often they would do this after they had a regular snort; some of the powder would remain in the nostril and the squirt would wash that down as an added bonus. They would also take the neosynepherine bottle on planes with them, use it whenever they liked, and no one would be the wiser.
    Whenever I was taken over to Sammy Davis, Jr.’s house, there would be cocaine and amyl nitrites—this was Sammy’s big thing. Everything with Sammy always had to be an all-night session and he needed whatever he could get to stay awake. Amyl nitrites—how I hated them! Whenever he shoved one into my nose, I’d hold my breath.
    It all seems so ironical. I finally found my freedom, finally got away, and one of the first things I did was walk into the cocaine trap.
    A week after my visit to Florida, Larry Marchiano joined me in California. And my new life began.

four
    Larry Marchiano came out to Hollywood with his wardrobe of dungarees and T-shirts, with his work boots and casual ways. He wasn’t into pornography, showed no interest in kinky sex, didn’t do cocaine. And most of all, he seemed to care about me—not me as a product or a sex machine or a potential gold mine, but me as a human being. I hadn’t met a man like Larry Marchiano in far too long.
    Part of his role would be to offer protection. Here I knew I was in particularly good hands. Larry is not tall but he is muscular; he has always worked with his hands and one of his hobbies has been the martial arts. It was so strange to be with a man with these abilities and never have them directed against me. Larry immediately started cushioning me against other people, forming a barrier between myself and those who wanted to take advantage of me.
    And he began to know me, began to realize the kind of person I really was. The truth was this: After breaking away from Charles Traynor, I never again would settle for sex without love. What I wanted—all that I ever wanted—was a lasting, loving relationship.
    Although I met many movie stars at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion West, I never accepted their invitations. I remember the night I met Warren Beatty, the Warren Beatty, the same Warren Beatty whose picture was pasted all over my bedroom wall when I was fifteen or sixteen; then, just the thought of him touching my hand would create shivers. Suddenly here he was, the real person, asking me to go home with him. Several different nights he invited me to go off with him. If ever I faced temptation, it was then. Still I never went. It just wasn’t my thing. In fact, at the Playboy Mansion I felt most at home with the help, and some evenings I spent the whole night hanging out with them in the kitchen, just talking.
    One of the men I responded to was Shel Silverstein, the Playboy artist and writer. I can remember just sitting in the jacuzzi with him and talking. I always liked Shel. The thought of having sex with him never crossed my mind; if anything, I feared that. That whole world seemed unreal then and more unreality wasn’t what I needed.
    And now with Larry joining me on the West Coast, it was back to business. Directly ahead of me lay something I had been dreading—a trip across Canada to publicize the movie Linda Lovelace