Is going through life and being mistaken all the time for an 8 by 10 glossy as easy as it sounds? [Speaking from past experience, I’d say, yeah, it is.]

On the subject of walking Ken Dolls and proving what a vast ocean porn is, the last time I ran into Dale Dabone was the opening of Brick Majors’ strip club in Canoga Park. And that was a long, long time ago.

In the intervening years, Dabone, much like the picture of Dorian Gray, hasn’t changed much. Back then he was riding the wave. Today Dabone’s riding a horse named humility. He’s traded cocky for cognizance; pomposity for philosophy and is detailing the journey in a book titled, “Life Sentence”. Which must be the fate of guys who don’t have the looks of a Dale Dabone.

“Porn IS a life sentence,” Dabone states emphatically.

“That’s how the beginning of the book starts off. How do you do life? There’s a lot of ways. You can commit a crime. Or it could be your job. My life sentence was when I came into this business called porn. I thought seven years, and I’m gone. I’d be coaching tennis or traveling around the world.”

Not that Dabone’s squawking. Being in porn has granted him a recognition that giving tennis lessons to horny housewives sans panties never would.

Maybe the most famous chapter or chapters in the Dabone oeuvre would have to involve women’s tennis star Jennifer Capriati. It was only June of last year that the world-at-large had some inkling that Dabone and Capriati were an item.

There was a gossip story about a Capriati overdose and that DaBone, now 39, began tweeting about his relationship with her.

Actor, stuntman, motorcyclist, musician, DaBone at the time reported that Capriati overdosed because she was despondent that he had returned to appearing in adult movies.

“I just talked to her….she said it was because of me…..I wanna puke right now….I fell [sic] lower than low,” DaBone tweeted on the day Capriati’s overdose was reported.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing……..can’t believe what she just told me,” he continued. Then, “She can blame me…but I quit my whole life to be with her.. I gave her my soul and she left me… I never meant for this to happen.”

The conjecture was that DaBone’s recent return to porn in “Batman XXX: A Porn Parody” sparked it. It got to the point that Bone, besieged by press inquiries, didn’t want to talk to anyone about the episode, but he was way more forthcoming during our chat this week.

Dabone tells me he was debating whether to leave the business before he met Capriati.

“I was kinda teeter-tottering, like, what am I going to do? But when I met her it was the kick in the ass. That was it. I said I’m done, and I’m going to move to Florida to be with her.”

As things like this normally go, it was totally by accident. Even in high school, Dabone fantasized about Capriati. [I could get into that whole thing about visualization but now is not the time.]

“I used to love her but I never told anybody,” Dabone admits.

“It was a schoolboy crush. But when you’re a baseball player or a jock you don’t talk about women’s tennis.”

Dabone relates a story about how he and long time pal Joey Ray were flipping through the TV channels looking for something, anything and landed on a women’s tennis match. Ray wasn’t aware that Dabone was into the sport, but Dabone said, yeah, he liked “the chick” playing. Which happened to be Capriati. Ray, goes wait a minute, that he’s seen her before.

“I know her,” Ray says.

“Remember a few months ago when I was in Miami. This tennis-thing was in town and one of the names kept coming up was Jennifer Capriati. The reason I remember is because I kept fucking with her, calling her Capri, Capri.”

Ray gets on the phone and calls a friend who presumably knows Capriati and asks if it’s possible to hook her up with Dabone who couldn’t believe any of this is happening. The message relayed back was, send Capriati a picture. Capriati then sent an e-mail asking Dabone if that was really him. Satisfied with the answer, she sent him her phone number.

“Within a couple of days something that was a high school crush became a reality, as we started talking” says Dabone, noting that he never let on that he was in the porn business but was apparently willing to travel.

“In the beginning it was tough to get together,” he recalls. “But sparks flew and it was great.”

The relationship went on for at least five years, but when Capriati flew to LA is when Dabone started getting nervous. They went to a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and Dabone figured it would be safe. Wrong.

“Fuckin’ Stephen Dorff was there, the actor,” recalls Dabone.

“He was there with a fuckin’ porn star. I’m like, sonofabitch. The chick he was with must have told him because as soon as I go to the bathroom, I guess he knows Jennifer and told her who I was.”

At which point Capriati demands that Dabone take her home [the hotel where she was staying in LA] and that she was never speaking to him again.

“I never thought I was going to see her again. It was really bad. I was devastated. I was crushed.”

Dabone followed up with a message telling Capriati on paper maybe it’s not what you want, but there’s no man on the planet that will treat you as good.

“She said ‘I have to be honest with you. I date guys who were the ‘good people of the world’, the rock stars, the actors, the sports stars. They treated me like a shit. Here you are a porn guy who’s treated me better than anyone else has.’

“Eventually in the end, any time we argued, porn would always come up. Just like if you ever cheat on your wife and she takes you back. Everything’s good, but you could argue about spilled milk and by the end of the argument it’ll be you cheated on me!”

The breakup, says Dabone, is what prompted him back into porn.

“I realized this is the bed you made, you better go live in it. I was kicking around the idea – did I want to come back or stay in Florida? I was trying to make things work there when I got a call from Axel Braun telling me he had this huge movie. I didn’t know that parodies were the big thing. I had no idea what was going on in porn.

“He said I want you to play Batman. Wow, that’s kinda cool. I can play a character. Usually they just hire me to be Dale Dabone- cocky, arrogant. I’ve always played those guys. A stretch, huh? I thought this was a chance to really show off my chops. Fuck yeah, I said. I’ll do it. So I did one and ended up staying here!”

Somewhat immodestly, Dabone will tell you, if you want the best actor to deliver the goods and want it done right, call him.

“The roles I get are amazing but are very few, far and in between,” he admits.

“People don’t think I do gonzo, and that I have this astronomical rate,” he concedes, thus is his reasoning at this stage of the game for hiring the services of Rising Star PR, www.risingstarpr.com

“I’m getting the word out there- maybe back in the day it was total arrogance, but I’m humble. I lost everything. I was borrowing money to eat at McDonald’s. It was bad, Jack.”

Was the arrogance inherited or did Dabone train extensively to become a cocky Ninja warrior? Dabone, who grew up in a single parent household, says he learned to get tough from his late mother, a biker, who rode with The Outlaws and Hells Angeles.

“Mom was tough and strong and she was dish. She urged me to grow my hair long. Now I’m a grown man, strong, muscular and I take no shit from anybody. But when I was young, I used to get beat up all the time. I was shy and kind of standoff-ish.

“When I’d come home from school my mom would tell me one more kid beats you up, I’m going to kick your ass. Don’t even come home. Then she put me in Martial Arts classes. Because I didn’t have a father around, she taught me how to be tough.”

Once Dabone got around to kicking the school bully’s ass, he told himself he’d never take shit again from anyone.

“Maybe that’s not the right attitude,” he admits.

“But to me it’s easier to be cocky and walk into a room and demand respect and have a presence without saying a word.”

Dabonealso remembers kids in school maturing faster than he.

“All of the other kids were starting to grow beards and have hair under their arms,” he says.

“I was a baseball player, and we’d go into the locker room and they had big dicks. I didn’t want to take a shower because I hadn’t gone through my stage. I’m like what the fuck is wrong with me? Even though I wasn’t so much afraid of any man, people were still bigger than me so I got picked on.”

When he turned 21 or 22, Dabone magically sprouted overnight like the proverbial beanstalk.

“I grew like a foot with weight and muscles. Something kicked in. Whoa. I walked into clubs and, by now, I had a better sense of style. In North Carolina [where he grew up] you don’t think about looking good or looking like Tom Cruise or a rock star.”

Dabone’s friend from Florida gave him styling pointers and how to dress.

“I started doing that,” Dabone notes.

“In North Carolina if you walk into one of those redneck clubs and look meek, you get your ass whipped. So you had to kind of come in with a little attitude. And it happened overnight. I’d just walk in and chicks would stare at me. The only bad thing is I started believing how cool I was.

“It was good because I knew the formula, and I could get any chick I wanted, manipulate and do the things I wanted.”

Dabone also learned a valuable lesson many guys flunk.

“I started being an asshole,” he laughs.

“You’re that, they love you more. I grew up yes mam, no mam, anything you want, and I’d get roasted a lot. Girls would just break my heart. The same friend said fuck that! I don’t care how lonely you are; when a chick calls you tell her hold on, I’ll get back to you.

“They say I’m an asshole, but women responded to that. I go what the fuck. I’d be mean to this chick and she’d be on my dick. So the bad thing is you get this reputation for being arrogant and cocky. But I loved it and I was eating it up. It was beautiful and horrible at the same time.”

During his many wind sprints to the vanity mirror, Dabone began stripping, and a porn producer wanted Dabone’s girlfriend to do a movie called Carolina Kids.

“I told her, fuck yeah, I’m all about it,” Dabone recalls. The producer suggested Dabone and his girlfriend work together.

“I didn’t give a fuck about being a porn star,” Dabone laughs.

“We did it, and the executives from Adam & Eve who were going to distribute the movie wanted to know who I was. At this point they didn’t want her; they didn’t care about her. Then I met with people who said we’ll fly you to LA, you’ll be a superstar and we’ll put you on a boxcover with Nina Hartley.

“I thought they were full of shit, but they mailed a first class ticket to go to LA for two weeks. So my very first movie, contracted, was with Nina Hartley. It was surreal.”

Pretty funny when you think that Adam & Eve was in Dabone’s neck of the woods all along.

“I had no idea what porn was all about,” Dabone laughs, contemplating life’s little ironies.

“I never wanted to be a porn star, never thought about it. It was never a dream of mine, none of that shit!”