Porn Valley- I was speaking to Ethan Cage – that’s Mr. Lexi Lamour to you, bucko. We were on the Team Tyler shoot at KSEX Saturday morning. I’m telling Cage [pictured left] he’s got a phenomenal speaking voice. Coulda gone into radio. Could be doing voiceovers, commercials, who knows. Chef Jeff [pictured right] was agreeing- said Cage has got a set of pipes like James Earl Jones. I’m thinking more like Fred Gwynn but close enough. Cage’s vowels roll like thunder, either way.

Besides that, Cage and Jeff had something more mutual in common. Both their wives were getting banged by Steven St. Croix in the next room.

Rather than being the better half of Lexi, Cage said he’s been called the worse half. He and Lexi have known one another since they were five and began dating in high school. “We were boyfriend-girlfriend in elementary school but that didn’t count,” he says. “We grew up in the same little town in Indiana.” Cage said it was a shitty place to grow up. “Everybody knew your business.” And screwing around was out of the question, said Cage, because you’d get caught at everything you’d do. Cage suspects that it was the comfort level after those many years that prompted him and Lamour to start dating. “We were friends all that time. We hooked up and got together.”

But Cage is also quick to point out that Lexi wasn’t necessarily his first sex but his first love. “I don’t even remember her name,” says Cage taking a run-for-cover stance on the question of his cherry-breaking. “Is that bad?”

I suggest, yeah, because the first pop shot is something near and dear to a man’s heart. “It wasn’t that great for me,” claims Cage who thinks he might have been 14 or 15 and the girl the same age. Cage concedes that a babysitter story might have made for a better interview but these are the facts such as they are. His dating Lexi was a mutually arrived at decision. “We could tell- we went out; we kissed and we’ve been together ever since.”

I ask Cage what he did for kicks in a one-horse town. “Drove fast,” he says laconically. “I raced cars on back roads. Then you’d have sex. There was nothing else to do so you’d find people to have sex with.” Cage was not into sports in high school. “I wasn’t allowed to be,” says Cage. “I was too skinny.” I’m telling Cage, whoa. He’s from Indiana, basketball country and is built like a basketball player.

“I was 6’4″, 150 pounds in high school,” he says. “I had no mass to throw anybody around.” On the other hand, Cage was good at finding trouble but it wasn’t with fast cars. “It was much worse than that,” he says, noting that Lexi was definitely attracted to the bad boy image. “It was beyond James Dean,” he laughs. So I go with Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Cage says it’s more like Brando in The Godfather. “I started hanging out with some guys in Chicago,” he explains as if the phrase guys from Chicago says it all.

The guys from Chicago line is generally a dead giveaway that maybe cement is involved, recreationally. Regardless, says Cage. He got in a lot of trouble through those associations. I figured it was too late for bootlegging but Cage remains purposefully vague. “It was bad things,” he says. “If you can find the newspapers, I was front page news. It was regional. It scared me straight. I got in a lot of trouble and said I’m done. No more being stupid.” Cage says this is a few months before he began dating Lamour. “I was in too much trouble.- she wouldn’t come around me.”

According to Cage, the first time he and Lamour had sex was a bit awkward. “Because we were such good friends.” Cage thinks maybe it took two months before they were comfortable enough to starr having sex. “Once we did, we did it all the time.”

Cage remembers when he was 21 and went to a strip club where his brother was the manager. “I walked in and expected all the girls to be like Barbie dolls with the big boobs and tiny little figures,” he says. “I was like there’s nobody here that fits the Barbie doll image. Lexi asked me how it was. I said nothing special. I said you could do it. She said no. I said, yeah, you could. It turned into a dare and she ended up doing. There was an amateur contest and they offered her a job. She got the job and started dancing.” Cage swears it didn’t bother him.

Lamour danced at a club in northwest Indiana for about a year then began doing feature pageants. Cage say he adapted to the lifestyle of a suitcase pimp. “I had a decent job and she begged me to quit it and go on the road with her.” Cage was an assistant manager of a quick lube. “Which it paid well. It had benefits.” I ask Cage if he got paid in a jiffy. He reacts like he’s heard this joke on at least a few occasions.

Cage traveled with Lamour. “She did that a few years and competed in all those feature pageants which are a complete sham,” he says. “Then we finally looked at it, like, we can’t go any further here. She had done everything.”

Cage says they were at a club in Oregon where Jessica Drake was dancing right down the street. “We had met Jessica when she first came into the business,” Cage notes. “She remembered us and she came in to see us. She signed a DVD for us and said if you’re ever thinking about doing porn…and she wrote her phone number. We talked about it for two weeks and she called Jessica. We came to L.A. and figured let’s try it.”

Lamour came to L.A. in 2003 and Drake took the whole week Lamour was here to take her on go-sees, from company to company. “She was just doing girl-girl at the time,” says cage. “I think she shot three things while she was out here.” She and I did a blowjob line for Simon Wolf which I don’t even know if it ever got released. They asked if I was going to perform. I said I don’t know, I don’t know if I can. They said, basically, they’d pay us a minimal amount and we would come in- it would be the two of us- a total of three people in the room to see if I could perform. I did. We did that, then she did Handjob Honeys for Toxxxic. And she did a movie for Jill Kelly Productions. It was her first feature.”

Because he wasn’t really working in movies, Cage says it was weird for him to be on set. “Once she moved up to boy-girl we were able to introduce me and I was able to start getting some work.” Last week Cage ended up doing three scenes for James Avalon. “I was supposed to do one but because of people not showing up, I filled in. I was supposed to do one scene and P.A. for the movie. I ended up doing three scenes and P.A.’ing the whole movie.”

Cage isn’t sure but thinks the movie’s going to be titled A Bust Full of Dollars. “It was a comedy.”

Cage is getting most of his work by simple networking. “Then they’ll usually call and give me a try. Lexi’s a girl so if they’re looking for a particular blond with big boobs they can call her. She works as much as she wants to, I think. She’s with Exotic Star Models, www.exoticstarmodels.com. She’s told them maybe two, three scenes a week. But she’d rather do the feature stuff- that’s more where your name grows.”

Life on the road is never dull and Cage recalls one instance of a fistfight in Darlington, S.C., which is probably better known for its NASCAR track. Cage and Lamour were at a huge club one night. “It was a Friday night and there were probably 150 people,” he says. “We were in her dressing room and I said it sounds busy. She goes, no, something doesn’t sound right. I walked out there and there was 150 people fighting. Even the dancers were fighting with the female customers. It was that out of hand. I’m like, I’m going back to the dressing room. Who am I going to help? I don’t know who’s who.”

The fight wasn’t over NASCAR as you might expect. The bachelor in a bachelor party slapped a waitress on the ass and one of the regular customers didn’t appreciate it and started a fight with the bachelor.

“His party got involved and it just escalated,” says Cage who’s always made it a point of staying away from the fracas. “Whenever fights break out in clubs, the only thing I do is grab her and I get her either behind the bar, in the bathroom, in her dressing room- just a safe place out of it. She catches a right hook in the eye, then she’s out of work for a few weeks.”

So far Cage is enjoying the business. “Some scenes are better than others; but for the most part I like doing features. I think it’s fun playing different characters although I didn’t like dressing like a cowboy [in Bust Full of Dollars]. That’s really not my thing. But you can’t say anything bad about gonzo, either. You’re in and you’re out; you’re done.”

The fact that Lamour is now working with other guys took a little bit of getting used to, says Cage. “The first three or four scenes she did, I was creeped out. But then she worked with some of the reals pros. It was, like, this is how it’s supposed to be.” Explaining “creeped out,” Cage said it was one of those things that he didn’t know how to react to. “It was uncomfortable,” he states. “She always likes me to stick around and I’m not comfortable sitting around while she does a scene.”

In high school, Cage was a jealous boyfriend. “And she was crazy-jealous, too- wildly jealous,” Cage adds. “Once we were together a few years, we just realized that neither one of us is going anywhere. We can do it and it’s just a job. More or less when I need to have any mental inspiration during a scene if it’s not going that well, I just think of her, anyway. It doesn’t bother me that she’s doing scenes with guys. I prefer that she works with the pros.” By the same token, his wife seems to be fine with the fact that Cage works with other women.

“She doesn’t like to be there while I’m shooting,” he says. “She doesn’t like to watch. She’ll watch the movies when they come out. My first movie, we just got a hold of the other day. She watched it and she liked it.”

With both of them doing scenes, exhaustively, I ask Cage if he and Lexi are more inclined to turn on the television than each other. “No,” he says. “If she does a scene with one of these beer cans out there, obviously she’s sore at the end of the night so there’s no chance of sex happening that night. But neither of us try working every day of the week, either. I don’t want to suffer from a burnout. I want to make it at least a year!”

Cage says he and Lamour are both too new in the business to even entertain plans about forming production companies, etc. “She started in 2003 but we were still back in Indiana flying out here for a couple of weeks at a time,” he says. “She didn’t start doing this full time until September of last year. So I think we’re still too new to it.”