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  The pregnancy failed to impress the panel. Isabel Roy, Little Miss Teen Queen New Orleans '85, was dethroned by '86, when she began showing. Not only was she unwed, but she had not been eighteen when she had become pregnant. Wayne Lomax was 29, and he managed a chicken place. Assistant managed. Isabel was a high school senior who was prettier than she was smart. They were wedded quickly and defiantly of those who shunned them.

  In November, Wayne was struck at a crosswalk. It was a hit-and-run. Louisa was six weeks old. The marriage had lasted four months.

  Those who knew her said that Isabel was never quite the same after the accident. She'd lost so much, even though it had meant so little to her. Her grief, profound and unusual in presentation, caused her to live the rest of her life in abeyance. Never again was Isabel Roy fully there.

  Isabel was never any good at anything, and she was charming enough that she didn't have to be. There was always a boyfriend for she and her daughter to live with. Her job became keeping them interested. This became difficult when Lou became old enough to resent instability, and bitter enough to be vocal about it. The pair lived in every shitty little town along the Gulf Coast by the time Louisa had finished middle school. She acted out and raised hell in every single one of them. That summer, the man who would become Isabel's second husband would relocate the family to Savannah, Georgia.

  In the city, Lou got her first job washing dishes at a drag cabaret, where she learned how to wing eyeliner and walk in stripper shoes on her breaks. This was fitting, as the only future anyone saw for the troubled teen was in a pair of lucite heels. But her fresh start also included a computer engineering program at her new high school. She got involved because it was free, and she'd never before been able to pursue a hobby of her choice without any money. She shocked everyone by being good at it. So good that the smart-mouthed delinquent she had been before seemed to have been left behind in the parishes. Lou realized early that by being exceptional (which was not all that hard in her piece of shit school), she could create for herself an escape from the poverty and helplessness which had defined her early life.

  Having been misled to believe that student loans were free money, she accepted an offer to Stanford University in 2004. Nobody in her life knew any better; college wasn't for people like them. They had no more practical guidance to offer her than they did spare change. Louisa, long resentful and having felt she had never depended on her mother anyway, severed all ties with her when she left for California. They have not missed each other.

  On her eighteenth birthday, about a month after classes started, she started dancing at strip clubs and getting naked in front of her dorm room camera. Her peers were wealthy, and she hungered for their lifestyles, which she couldn't obtain as a dishwasher. Priorities askew, Lou fell hard back into old habits. Stress and exhaustion weakened her grades and increased her tendencies to be violent and combative. Additionally, she developed quite the ego. Her clientele had grown to include famous people, with whom she would spend her spare time getting photographed with while her classmates - bless them - drank in dorm rooms. She was friendless, but fabulous. At eighteen, this still seemed like an excellent trade.

  The plan was to get back from Las Vegas in time for her sophomore year finals, it really was. After all, she'd only come out to relax. She relaxed so well, in fact, that she was detained in the drunk tank following a(nother) fight at a strip club. Samples taken tested positive melange of substances which may have contributed to her irritability that night. Stanford didn't want her after that. Neither did the club. Broke, aimless, and about to be a convicted felon, Lou bummed around friend's couches while she waited for life to figure itself out for her.

  It didn't, but she got a porn contract, somehow. Her D-list celebrity hanger-on status generated enough interest in seeing her naked that she could make a profit, and so she did. What she initially agreed to do “because why the hell not?” snowballed into one of the most successful porn careers of the 2000s, which she thinks is absolutely hilarious. Lou Lomax was not someone destined for success, and she spent the first several years of her career self-sabotaging to ensure she would never obtain it. In spite of this, her devoted fan following created for her several opportunities to be (stunt) casted in mainstream Hollywood productions, and interest in her blog about sex work and feminist issues lead to bylines in Vice, The New Inquiry, and, most recently, The New York Times. After ten years in the industry as of 2014, Lou has calmed down. She has also tentatively retired from the adult industry, intending to focus on writing and advocacy while occasionally making bank off of whichever not terribly offensive “Hot Girl #3”-type roles Hollywood will throw at her. She has reached a level of stability in her life which she has never before known, and she wants to experience it without distractions. Though she is neither rich nor famous, she is comfortable, and that is all she has ever wanted.