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 Shannon Wilsey was born October 9th, 1970 in southern California to teenage parents who were certainly ill prepared for her birth. "Oh " Mike Wilsey intoned at his 17 year old girlfriend's bedside. "I really wanted a boy." He left them, the mother and child, turned around after seeing his newborn daughter and walked out of the hospital. In many ways, he never came back. Not completely, anyway.
Ms. Wilsey's parents were married, divorced, and completely estranged by Shannon's second birthday, though Shannon's mother, Pamela, remarried shortly after. Shannon was immediately given her step father's last name and was henceforth called Shannon Longoria. They were a happy family. They never spoke of Mike Wilsey, and Shannon never knew that the man she had always believed to be her father was, in fact, of no blood relation to her. It was a secret they kept from her, a secret no one even considered divulging. Until Shannon's Junior High School did it for them. Shannon was informed that as no formal adoption had occurred, she was not legally permitted to register under the name Longoria; she was told she would have to use her father's name; she would have to register under Shannon Wilsey.
Dime-store psychology will tell you that this is the moment when the splitting of Shannon Wilsey began, with the life altering news that she was not who she thought she was, that her entire identity was a phantasm designed to protect her from a father who'd never wanted her, who had left and not once looked back. Dime-store psychology will tell you that Shannon Wilsey spent the rest of her very short life both looking for a way back to the beginning, and running from it. "I'm going to be a movie star," Shannon told friends as a teenager. A movie star: an altered duplicate of the self. A double that lives spread across the anti-space the screen, the self and not the self; one person divided into two. It was a concept that was somehow mimetic of the life she had lived thus far, but with the rewards of fame, love, and ultimately recognition. Shannon Wilsey was desperate to be seen, to be affirmed through the magic of the gaze.
Shannon eventually did move to Hollywood, and she had small parts in a few B films in which she is credited under the name Shannon Wilsey. When she failed to gain the stardom she so desperately wanted (needed), she began posing for cheesecake photographs, which eventually led to soft core films, which eventually led to hard core XXX porn. She cycled through several stage names, Silver, Silver Kane, and Silver Cane among them, until finally resting on Savannah, a name she lifted from her favorite childhood film, Savannah Smiles. As Savannah, Shannon Wilsey eventually became one of the top porn stars of the early 90s, shooting nearly 100 films, winning AVN Starlet of the Year, and selling more videos than any of her peers. The problems, however, did not go away.
Shannon Wilsey was left with an irreconcilable divide that she would never find a way to mend. Savannah was who the public wanted, but Savannah wasn't a person; Savannah was only an image that floated across the screen, an emptied two dimensional dreamscape that gave away things that Shannon Wilsey never had ownership of in the first place. When Shannon Wilsey and Savannah mutually decided to aim a gun at the face they shared, no one was particularly surprised or shocked. In a way it was an action that ended a life that had not existed in any kind of holistic way for many years.
The story of Shannon Wilsey has utterly captivated me; it holds all of the mystery of the doppelganger, it is the palindrome of person versus personae, the magic of the mirror. I offer below an excerpt from a work in progress titled Laying the Ghost II, a title that references a video Savannah starred in about fucking a phantom, getting off on a body that isn't accessible on the physical plane. In the excerpt I deal with Savannah and Shannon as two completely separate entities forced to cohabitate in one body. It is my feeling that this is how Ms. Wilsey lived for at least half of her 24 years, as a body and a sprit that were unable to unify. Flesh and film are never going to meet, not in this world anyway, and Savannah and Shannon should stand as proof of this.
Pornography offers the voyeur the chance of complete and uncomplicated sexual release because there are no messy feelings encountered- it is ultimately an autonomous act. I would say that suicide offered both Savannah and Shannon the cleanest and most uncomplicated cum shot either had ever experienced. Their final action was a joint effort and perhaps it was the only true act of agency that either of them ever initiated.
Savannah (Laying the Ghost II)
Somehow, the video remained unaffected. The discharge of smoke and a strangely familiar flash of unbelievable light, the indisputable decision made by velocity and propulsion, the splitting of bone and spilling of contents upon impact; all of these facts failed to dim the soft, flesh colored flickering that issued from the gloss of a distant screen. "I love you," her voice promised on the tape, the stage lights glittering off of a sequined gown that had melted to her leg when she'd accidentally dropped a lit cigarette onto her lap. "Aren't you happy for me? I love you." So strange that this moment should remain even as her insides began to pour out in an unfathomable river from her nose and mouth, a tide that seemed to cease and then push forward in time with the ticking of a cooling engine. Flashing back and then forward, processing the past at the same time as she experienced the terminal now. "So weird," she thought, "like trying to watch three movies all at once!"
How fast it all happened! How accelerated the whole production felt when it sped by from beginning to end without being paused or fast forwarded and then rewound again. "So THIS is who I am!", she thought finally, like the light in the projection booth was suddenly aimed at her instead of the screen, a black hole in reverse, something coming together instead of breaking apart. It was a very lonely feeling, all of that constant breaking apart.
She was drifting in and out so quickly that it was hard to tell if she was at the beginning, middle, or end, and it took her a second to process where she was when she heard it: her name, her real name, someone was saying her name. "Stay with me, Shannon," a panicking voice, howling and animal, begging against time and the slow descent of the veil. The wires crossed; something farther away, something from some years before, a voice that said "you're beautiful, Savannah, I want you, you're beautiful," a coarse whisper that she always knew would be gone just when she'd come to expect it (where was everybody always going to without her?). Such a distance between each voice and no time left to cover it, only the words she'd said standing at a podium and glistening in a rainbow of light and sequins, threadbare applause, the bass rattle of a "booooooo!" and the brightness of a camera flash that always seemed to erase her by degrees even as it trapped her on film. "I want to thank all the critics who voted for me, and all the ones who didn't......I love you," she told them, "and if you don't love me, I'm sorry!"
Lights out.
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Skin. Miles and miles of skin if you put the reels together, if you could ever be bothered to line the film up end to end. You can watch them for yourself; there are nearly 100 of them. You can try to get Deep Inside Savannah like Buck Adams, T.T. Boy, Joey Murphey, Peter North and Micky Ray did; wait in the E.R. with Jon Dough and Dick Nasty for Savannah, R.N.; you can Lay the Ghost with Tom Byron and Joey Silvera, but you will never really find her there. Not ever. "Savannah's a dead fuck," her costars often said. "It's like she's not even fucking THERE. That bitch checks out as soon as you get your dick in her." Once during a shoot a director begged her to look alive, "Come on, Savannah, can you say 'Fuck me', or something? Give me something." "Fuck me, or something," she'd said, ass up and dead in the eyes, picking apart a leaf on a potted plant in front of her. "She was always high," many would say at the end. "She'd bring her fucking works on set, and you know that saying 'the lights are on but nobody's home'? Well the lights were out, you know what I mean? Don't bother to knock...." But they wanted her anyway. For a little while.
"Savannah? She was gorgeous, Savannah was a gorgeous girl when you could actually get her on the set. All that little girl white blonde hair and pale skin, big smile when she felt like turning it on.... Sometimes when we'd shoot her, we'd think the reels were going to be shit because you could see how fucked up she was; a lot of them have problems, don't get me wrong, but this girl was one of the worst and everybody knew it. Savannah had a reputation for always showing up hours late, holding everything up and cutting every 15 minutes to smoke or do a rail or wipe the snot off her face. You'd see this girl on the set and you'd know that she was just a total mess, glassy eyed and marks on her arms from skin popping H and shit, and I remember a lot of times we'd think the film was going to be absolutely useless, but once you watched the rushes you could understand why she was so popular. The closer the camera got to her, the more beautiful she looked. She looked like a fucking angel on film. An absolute wet fucking dream. Somehow that girl got transformed somewhere in the process; she turned into someone else, and I hate to say this, God rest her soul, but she turned into someone better."
There had been a time at the start, when she was still sometimes Shannon, that she'd thought that seeing herself in duplicate would be like looking in a mirror that gave her back to herself whole, or at least gave her back to herself in a way that made her sure of who she was. It had been a very long time since she had been completely sure about that. That's what happens when you put your insides up for rent; you end up with a lot of confusion about which parts belong to you and which parts belong to whoever it is that you've let inside. People always tell you thay you need to remember to lock the door behind yourself; she was always forgetting that you have to lock the door...
At first, I used to watch the videos and wish that i was her, I would wish that I could be Savannah and then sometimes I would hate her because she felt very far away from who I really was. Inside, I mean. Have you ever been somewhere and suddenly noticed someone walking towards you in a way that makes it clear that they are not going to be the one to alter their course? Have you ever looked at that person and told them with your eyes that you're not going to move for them either? That you hate them for even suggesting it and that you wouldn't move an inch, not one fucking inch for them? And has it ever turned out that that person was you? That you are actually just walking towards a mirror and into yourself? That's the way it was for me, only all the time. I was always confused about which one of us I was, and it wasn't until much later that I understood that that distance between us had shifted in a way that made me closer to my reflection than I was to myself. I lost track of the differences between the two of us, and that's a mistake that you should never, ever make.
At first we tried to share the big house in the Hills that Savvy paid for with the money from the Vivid contract. It was only rented, but it was so beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I'd ever lived and I felt very sure that we were going to be happy there because that had always been my dream, to live in a house in Hollywood high up on a hill where no one could ever get to me. There was a big walk in closet and a Jacuzzi and a garage where she kept the Corvette, and sometimes I would lay out in the sun all day, I would just lay there and feel the sun and wish that that was how my whole life could be, alone and quiet and peaceful. It was really Savannah's house, of course, and I didn't mind that she hung her pictures on the walls or filled the closet with her costumes because I understood that sometimes you have to be smart and keep your mouth shut. It was Savannah who never learned that.
END ACT ONE.
Written by Alissa Bennett
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