FYI: CAL JAMMER and JILL KELLY (The suicide story)
Joner1
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SOURCE: Cal Jammer and Jill Kelly
< http://www.access.digex.net/~nsmith/caljill/ >
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Cal Jammer and Jill Kelly
<Picture>It was pouring rain on the early evening of January 25th, 1995 as a
haggard-looking 34-year-old Randy Potes, known to sex film aficionados the
world over as porn stud Cal Jammer, drove like a maniac in his leased 1994
white Ford Ranger through the exclusive Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles.
He was a man on a mission, and that mission was death.
<Picture>For weeks Randy had been contemplating murdering his 23-year-old
estranged wife Adrianne, a fellow porn star (known variously as Seth Damien,
Calista, and Jill Kelly). Tonight, one way or another, someone was going to
die. Steering with one hand and furiously dialing his cellular phone with the
other, a sobbing Randy made call after call to Adrianne, yelling, screaming,
crying, "What the fuck are you doing to me!"
Each time as the abuse became worse, Adrianne would hang up on him. And when
Randy finally shrieked, "I need to talk to you, don't leave!" she hung up again
- she had been listening to Randy's suicide threats for nearly two years. But
as she clicked off, Randy glanced over at the seat next to him at the loaded
black 9mm semiautomatic handgun he had bought for just such an occasion. He
called his own home answering machine, leaving a goodbye message. The days of
"empty threats" were about to end.
Ignoring speed limits and traffic lights, Randy finally arrived at his
destination, his wife's rented Laurel Canyon home. A frightened Adrianne had
heard her husband drive up, and ran upstairs to her bathroom hiding behind a
shower curtain. A few moments passed and nothing - then she heard a loud noise.
"I heard a crash and I jumped. It sounded like a window breaking. I thought
Randy had broken a window to get in. I went downstairs and crawled to the door.
There was nothing broken." Adrianne recalls. The young wife then stepped out
into the rain, expecting to bump into her angry husband at any minute. But when
she rounded the concrete walkway to the steps leading to the street, she saw
Randy stretched out in the gutter.
"I saw Randy lying there on the ground and the gun a foot or two away from him.
I thought it was a joke and I laughed. I thought he was playing a trick on me,
with fake blood," she grimly remembers. But it was no joke. Randy had fired a
single shot into his right temple. "I called out to him , C'mon Randy, get up!
C'mon already, stop it!" Then, as she moved closer, she was seized by reality;
her husband lay crumpled in the mud, gore pouring into the street from a gaping
head wound.
I saw his brains. It looked like chewed up hot dogs coming out of the top of
his head. His left eye was filling with blood. I dropped my purse and ran to
him and felt his pulse. I lifted up his shirt to see if he was breathing, and
he wasn't," Adrianne tearfully recalls.
Panic-stricken Adrianne began to scream for help and stumbled into the house to
make a frantic, and futile, call to 911. "My husband just shot himself in the
fucking head! Please hurry! Pleas hurry!" But the LAPD was already on their
way, tipped off by a friend who had called moments earlier, warning that Randy
was "on his way over with a gun to kill himself and her too." Adrianne raced
back to her already brain-dead husband still yelling for help. A small group of
neighbors gathered around, standing horrified and helpless as Adrianne knelt,
crying hysterically by Randy's side. When, at Adrianne's insistence, a blanket
was placed over Randy, to "keep him warm," she lay down in the street next to
him in a growing puddle of blood and mud, pulling her coat over Randy, her arms
around him, pleading , "Randy, Randy, why did you do this, please don't die!"
The firemen arrived and gently pulled Adrianne away, her clothing caked with
her husband's blood, assuring her that Randy had never felt a thing.
When Randy was searched, police found two more bullets and a suicide note in
his front left pocket. The message was scrawled on the back of a sealed First
Interstate Bank envelope, which contained five one-hundred dollar bills. It
read, in Randy's typically childlike spelling:
Happy Birthday Big 24
I Allway Love You
I sorry we didn't work out
Randy
Adrianne, for one, does not believe that Randy was going to kill her. "Randy
could've gotten into the house if he wanted to. He knew the side window had no
lock on it. You don't write a note and leave a present for a person who you're
about to kill," she points out.
The fact that Randy, someone who seemingly had everything going for him , got
to such a desperate point has left the adult video community in a state of
stunned bewilderment. Handsome, healthy, energetic and outgoing, Randy had made
well over 500 hardcore videos since entering the sex business in 1989, and
gained a top-notch reputation throughout the industry as a crack set builder
and decorator.
<Picture>Between his on-screen interludes (including appearances in such carnal
classics as Deep Throat 5 (Arrow) and VCA's New Wave Hookers 2) and off-camera
craftsmanship, Randy became known as a tireless workaholic, and his efforts
resulted in a near six-figure income, with all the status-obligatory west coast
toys - condo, boat, car, jet skis, etc. - that go with a bulging bank account.
Randy was also universally liked as a "nice guy," always polite and considerate
to the women he worked with, and hardworking for his employers.
"For all the people in the business who are assholes, Randy was one of the few
that wasn't. Unlike most of the men, he actually liked women," asserts porn
icon Nina Hartley, who worked and swung with Randy over the years. He was
someone who, on paper, seemed to have his shit together.
But Randy had problems. Terribly insecure, weighted down with low self-esteem,
over-sensitive to even the slightest comment about his looks or performance
("Is my cock big enough?" "Is my tan dark enough?"), and driven by a sex
addiction that permeated every aspect of his life, he was actually a powder keg
waiting for a light. "Randy was very emotional," recalls porn star Shelby
Stevens, who worked in the same video as Randy the day before his death.
"Things affected him more than a lot of guys in the business, who are just
cold. Randy was never cold, and when he got hurt he took it more deeply." As
Randy worked his way up the ladder of porn success, he was actually setting the
stage for his own premature demise. As long as things were going his way, he
was happy-go-lucky pot-smoking Randy, but the sex, wealth, and fame - and above
all, the appearance of such - became essential parts of his reason for living.
Once he sensed them slipping from his grasp, his desire to live also began to
fade.
After a series of failed romances, Randy's 1993 Valentine's Day marriage to
Adrianne, a pleasant 5'5" blonde-haired hazel-eyed stripper, seemed to be the
missing piece in Randy's happiness puzzle. By all reports, the two were madly
in love, wedding a month after they met at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
annual sex video convention in Las Vegas. In a High Society interview with
Randy in the August 1993 issue, he referred to Adrianne as his "soulmate,"
saying, "I know that love is stronger than anything you can describe. Making
love is better than having sex." And Adrianne agrees. "We were so, so much in
love. I called him my Poo Poo', and he called me Bambi'. It was true love for
both of us."
It was also a first for Adrianne, who considered herself a total lesbian, "I
would have sex with men, but I could only have a real relationship, and real
sexual satisfaction with a woman. Randy was the first man I was ever happy with
on all levels."
But the happy couple soon began having problems. At first, Randy kept making
videos, while Adrianne continued to strip. The inevitable jealousies and
dishonesties, though, led to Adrianne leaving him on a number of occasions,
only to return. Randy "gave up performing" in the fall of 1993 to do only set
construction - or so Adrianne though. "He was the first man I ever trusted, and
he lied to me. That's when our marriage started to fall apart." Randy secretly
continued making videos, and when his wife found out, she was devastated.
The fighting continued, and Adrianne claims Randy hit her a couple of times.
Under mounting emotional and financial pressures, Adrianne finally moved out
for good in the late summer of 1994, and starting doing videos herself. "He was
basically al little boy trying to be a man. I couldn't satisfy him - no woman
could. We'd get in a fight, and I'd say I was going to leave. He would say he
was going to kill himself. He had talked about killing me or himself for nearly
two years, so I couldn't take him seriously," she remembers.
<Picture>Randy's "cheating," though, was grounded in a far more serious issue -
Randy's lifelong addiction to women. "He was a sex addict, plain and simple,"
sighs Adrianne. Adrianne describes their marriage as one long conversation
about "sex, sex, and sex." I love sex, and Randy loved pussy, so on that level
we got along great," says Adrianne. But that was the least of it. Before Randy
had even gotten into porn, he was a sex junkie, going through women like water,
exploring every possible sexual kink, and allowing his sexual impulses to
virtually control his life. It often seemed as if Randy couldn't help himself.
After his death, a search of Randy's Canyon County condo turned up hundreds, if
not thousands, of girls' names and phone numbers, scribbled hastily on business
cards, cocktail napkins, scraps of paper and notebooks, often with graphic
sexual observations attached - "Susan - Big tits," "Old friend Kim - fucked her
already" - all standing as testimony to over a decade of sel-indulged sexual
satyrism.
<Picture>After Adrianne moved out, Randy was free to reenter the video business
openly, as well as continue his perpetual pursuit of pussy. But by mid-fall,
Randy was getting depressed, feeling his career was going nowhere. Around the
same time, he began gravitating back to Adrianne, and the two began to sleep
with one another on an irregular basis - even making a video together, and
planning more. "I thought things were going to work out. We were going to stay
great friends and 'fuck-buddies.'" But Randy, seeing his income drop, feeling
hounded by several IRS audits, and under the impression that Adrianne's entry
into the business was costing him jobs (some porn directors are leery about
having "ex's" on-set together, for fear of conflicts), wanted Adrianne back.
And he became increasingly jealous of her rumored trysts with other men and
women.
In late 1994, Randy began to fixate more and more on getting back with Adrianne
as the solution to all his problems, and the two were discussing a
reconciliation. But by mid-January things were back to normal - bad - between
them. Randy's behavior was becoming more and more erratic.
Randy appeared depressed and distracted much of the time, once locking himself
out of his apartment. And worst of all, Randy, never known for being one of
those able-to-get-hard-on-a-dime performers, was experiencing intermittent
"wood" problems. His financial situation was getting so bad he felt he would
soon have to move back home - with his mother. But above all, he said,
Adrianne's refusal to come back to him was the greatest source of his
unhappiness.
And indeed that appeared to be the case. Randy's financial circumstances were
actually not nearly as bad as he made out. He was working and earning steadily,
and his IRS problem only amounted to a few thousand dollars - Randy had that
much just stashed around his apartment.
But in Randy's agitated state of mind, these became colossal issues. Three days
before Randy killed himself, Adrianne called him from San Francisco, where she
was shooting a film, and told him it was now completely over, once and for all.
Adrianne was seeing someone else - another woman. Randy became distraught, at
first proposing an "open" marriage, and then exasperatedly asking, "But can I
still fuck you?" The next day he called Adrianne back and told her he was
HIV-positive (a lie). "He was just saying anything he could think of to get me
back, to make me go to him. We always talked before about how if either of us
got AIDS we would stay married and die together."
In the last week of his life, Randy told a neighbor he "couldn't go on" without
his wife, told a girlfriend "life wasn't worth living," and warned a cameraman,
"You don't know how close to the edge I am, man, you don't know." He made
dozens of desperate phone calls around the clock to people he knew in the porn
business, desperately reaching out for someone, something - knowing he was
fading fast. But nobody took Randy seriously enough; nobody thought he'd really
do it.
In fact, porn actor/director Buck Adams admits speaking to Randy the day he
died and advising him, by phone, that if he felt he was going to harm Adrianne,
he should harm himself instead. Adams says Randy agreed with him. He said,
"Okay Buck, thanks a lot, I always knew I could count on you for the right
advice."
The day Randy took his own life, he was out of control. His agent, Jim South,
remembers Randy stopping in close to 5 p.m. "He seemed very sad, almost teary
eyed," recalls South. "I asked him if he was okay, had he said, in a shaky
voice, Jim, she's costing me a lot of work.'" A few minutes later, Randy got up
suddenly, as if he had made some type of decision, and purposefully strode
toward the door. South called out to him several times, but Randy ignored him.
He headed for his truck, and his date with destiny - ending it all 45 minutes
later in a dirty pool of rainwater, mud and blood.
At the funeral a week later, a shattered Adrianne delivered a tear-filled
eulogy. "You were the most beautiful person in the world to me, Randy Layne
Potes. I will always, always love you, and no one will ever take that from me."
Adrianne now keeps her husband's cremated remains in a blue velvet box by her
bed.
In the end there wasn't much more left of Randy. He'd let too much of himself
become the fabricated character Cal Jammer, and retained too little of the real
man Randy Potes. It cost him his life.
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