From the Gene Files 2/28/02- Rick Masters is looking Reservoir Dogs cool. Black suit. Sunglasses. Blond hair now. Combed back. Rings on all of his fingers. Masters is running out of fingers. Masters is looking like a babe magnet except he’s married. Only he doesn’t know where his wife is. She disappeared to Florida, he thinks. But she’s her own story. Charlie Sheen gave her $30,000 to get out of his pompadour. Get out of town. The babe is Charlese L’Amour – profiled on all the tabloid shows for scaling Sheen’s fence and incurring a lawsuit for being Sheen’s love nuisance.

Gene: What happens now. You’re blond. You’re tan.

Masters: Got into the gym. I put 35 pounds on. After I got married I came back to the business for about a year. Wasn’t doing very good.

Gene: Let me get this straight. AFTER you got married you came back. Usually you get married and leave.

Masters: I got married and left. But you heard the whole story about the wife jumping over the fence at Charlie Sheen’s house. Getting beat up..

Gene: I don’t remember you being married to Charlese L’Amour.

Masters: Yeah. Basically that destroyed me. I quit this and was restoring Fifties cars. Nashes With the marriage I said okay I’m not going to do this any more. I’m going to have a normal life and the wife couldn’t stick to it.

Gene: Without putting too delicate of a point to it, didn’t she have a little bit of a problem with alcohol?

Masters: yeah. A big problem. Not when I met her. I don’t know what happened. She hid it from me until we got married. Then she was doing alcohol, Xanax, GHB and whatever else she could get her hands on.

Gene: What was the resolution of that thing.

Masters: I guess he paid her off like thirty grand and she split to Florida. I haven’t seen her since.

Gene: He paid her off?

Masters: Another lawsuit would have been big press. A stripper-porn chick jumping over his wall. He didn’t need those problems right after the drug charges.

Gene: So he paid her to disappear.

Masters: Paid her to disappear. And she disappeared. I was happier than all hell. She stuck around him the whole time which was making me more and more aggravated.

Gene: At the time you were married she was fucking around.

Masters: She was fucking around and I had a ten hour a day, six days a week job. I was busting my ass and she was running around doing whatever the hell she wanted.

Gene: You were restoring cars and she was restoring other men’s vitality.

Masters: Absolutely. But I’m glad she’s gone. It taught me a bog lesson.

Gene: So you were convinced you were going to reinvent yourself?

Masters: This year. I tried for a little bit of a change. Everyone was probably tired of me. I look a little different. Though I do as good a job as anyone out there. Been around for 11 years, though, and you get tired of me after 11 years.

Gene: Guys looking at other guys you have to be kind of worried about that.

Masters: I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about the people, say, I work for Jim Powers a lot. They don’t want to use me in every scene. But if I can look different…

Gene: On a day in, day out basis, you still get the call, right?

Masters: Yeah. I’m working about every day right now. Two scenes a day.

Gene: Are you going to keep the new look?

Masters: As long at it works.

Gene: A little bit of history. Who first brought you into the business.

Masters: Ron Hightower. He and I were the best of friends. We used to hang out.

Gene: I remember when Hightower was trying to get a break.

Masters: I remember Hightower saying to me you should try to do porn, you should try to do porn…I’m saying I can’t do it. And there was this old agent. He died. Old Jewish guy..Herman. He had Persia staying with him. I went over to shoot a demo. She was the first girl I dated in the business.

Gene: Don’t you know you’re not supposed to be dating porn stars.

Masters: I know.

Gene: Haven’t you learned your lesson.

Masters: Strippers are worse.

Gene: And you’re not supposed to marry porn stars.

Masters: I know now. But strippers are worse. Not that they aren’t great to look at, but they have some issues.

Gene: Ever try dating a girl out of the business?

Masters: Yeah, I did. And she ended up getting in the business as Kirsty Way.

Gene: Who did you do your first ever scene for.

Masters: Paul Norman. A movie called In Your Face Again. Chi Chi Laroux directed it. I got a blow job from Trixie Taylor and I had to stand between Ron Hightower and this big guy tattooed out named Angel. I was 90 pounds soaking wet with a Beatles haircut and acne. The heart’s racing and I’m in this black room with a spotlight. I did great. I was just a little nervous. Then I did all the Bowen years of course. We called it the training ground- I did three to four scenes a day every day. A lot of money. Those were the hard days and that’s when Dave Hardman and I kinda dropped the d.p. into focus for everybody. We did d.p.’s.

Gene: You guys were the d.p. twins.

Masters: We were the innovators. I think we brought that into mainstream porno. Nobody else was doing it. And we did double anals. Now it’s common place.

Gene: You and Dave had the reputation of going where no one else dared to go.

Masters: We were the bad boys.

Gene: You’d be doing girls that others would be rolling their eyeballs at. In the pre-Viagra days had did you manage that.

Masters: I don’t do that stuff now. I flat out refuse. I think it’s a cop-out. If you can’t do this job without it you don’t belong in this business. Period. That’s my opinion on it.

Gene: I here the argument going many different ways, and more often than not your name is usually dragged into it. You have to compete with Rick Masters.

Masters: What if I took Viagra, how fair would that be to them. I’m doing four scenes a day. What am I going to do, nine now?

Gene: Are you still able to do four.

Masters: I did eight scenes for Dane three months ago in one day.

Gene: Get the fuck outta here.

Masters: Blow jobs and scenes- eight pops

Gene: Over a stretch of how long.

Masters: Eight in the morning to midnight.

Gene: How do you reconstitute.

Masters: On a good day you gotta eat. Eat food all day long and sleep if you can. Find a quiet place.

Gene: I defy you to tell me every girl you worked with for those eight scenes.

Masters: I forget.

Gene: Of course: I remember Don Fernando bragging about doing seven pops in one day.

Masters: In the old days I could have beat that. I was working for Dave Perry for $50 a scene and 10 dollars a pop. That’s all the work I could get.

Gene: With all of that work, all of that activity some accountant must be going this guy’s worth a shit pot full of money.

Masters: I’m really bad with money. I never did too good. I never got my real stardom. I never got the huge name. I’ve got a notorious reputation, yeah. But I never won an award, for example, from AVN. Been nominated for something. Once.

Gene: How about XRCO?

Masters: No. They’d give swordsman to Dave Hardman, Steve Hatcher, they gave it to everybody but me. But I kinda stay out of sight. I don’t go to the parties. I’m really quiet. I’m not a big social animal. That’s probably one of the problems.

Gene: Funny you should say that because I always recall seeing your name in Luke Ford’s website.

Masters: Because he wanted to rip me up about the Krista-thing. He had accused me of giving her AIDS when she was with Matt Zane. We called him up and chewed him out. Then he wanted to talk shit about me and we went back and forth.

Gene: You were accused?

Masters: Remember when Marc Wallice was accused of giving all this stuff to the girls. The first people they went after were Dave Hardman and I. Everybody went head hunting for Dave and I. We were the first ones, blam, the next day getting tested going screw you. We didn’t do it. And we were on quarantine. How many scares were there? Four. I was on every quarantine list. And that’s part of my trying to clean up the image now. I’m tired of people running to me when something goes bad. Rick did it! Rick did it! It never was me. Rick never did it but I was always a scapegoat.

Gene: Have you ever been down due to a social disease.

Masters: We all get stuff once in awhile. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, whatever. It’s 11 years. It’s like playing poker. You’re going to end of with something once in a while. So you go to the doctor and you take the medicine and a couple of days off. Then you go back to work. You call everybody you worked with and trace it back to its roots. That way you nip it in the bud. Because in this business, stuff goes around.

Gene: What’s the most common thing.

Masters: I thing I had chlamydia twice. That’s about it. I got flu a bunch of times. I got sick, but nothing major. Never even seen a crab. I heard about those things, though. Everybody’s pretty good. With the new testing and AIM, that helps out a lot.

Gene: How come you never wound up with a production company.

Masters: I haven’t found anything I really want to shoot yet.

Gene: You’ve fucked just about everything haven’t you.

Masters: The fat girls. The ugly girls. Midgets. You have to pay your dues. You have to do all that shit.

Gene: In your recollection what was the grossest thing you ever had to do.

Masters: One of the first scenes I ever did. This girl named Connie. Capt. Bob came over and picked me up. We were driving with the girl up front and I was sitting in the back. We were in a convertible. Her hair blows forward and you can see all the weaves rubber banded in there. Okay, so the girl’s really got a bad weave I can deal with that. We get to the shoot and do a b.j. Then I go down on her pussy and it’s the worst thing I ever smelled in my life. It smelled like acetone and rotten fish. That’s the best way I can describe it. I almost puked. But I went down there and did it. I got through the scene somehow and went home. Two days later Hardman and I are eating pancakes. Capt. Bob called me back up and asked me if I wanted to work that day. I’m like who with. He goes that Connie chick again. I ran to the balcony and fuckin’ yakked all the pancakes right off the side of the building.

Gene: And you did the scene?

Masters: No, I didn’t do it.

Gene: In the movie version you would have done it.

Masters: Then there was a time I was working for Jim Powers and stuck a stick through my calf. Did a front flip over a bush and got this stick stuck through my leg. It put a hole in there about the size of a roll of quarters. I didn’t know it. I got up and kept chasing Flick Shagwell through the desert like another 20 feet. My leg’s wet. She’s like you got to go to the hospital. I’m going, Jim, I can’t even feel it. He says go to the hospital. I go- come back and Johnny Thrust had already done the scene.