Amber Van De Bunt - Overcome: A Memoir Of Abuse, Addiction, Sex Work, and Recovery

This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright 2019 by Amber van de Bunt

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to
print, audio, and electronic.

For more information, address:
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013

Set in Dante

epub isbn : 9781644280737

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bunt, Amber van de, author.
Title: Overcome: A Memoir of Abuse, Addiction, Sex Work,
and Recovery / Amber van de Bunt a.k.a. Karmen Karma.
Description: First Hardcover Edition | Genuine Barnacle Book |
New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280133
Subjects: LCSH Bunt, Amber van de. | StripteasersUnited States
Biography. | Motion picture actors and actressesUnited States
Biography. | Mothers and daughters. | BISAC BIOGRAPHY &
AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY &
AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts
Classification: LCC PN2287.B86 B86 2019 | DDC 792.7/028/0924dc23

To my daughter, Vienna,
for giving me strength before you were even born.

Contents

Everything in this memoir is one hundred percent
true as I remember it. Names and businesses
have been altered for privacy.

Small-Town Girl

E veryone else my age had been planning what college they would attend, what their major would be. I never even bothered. While my classmates were Googling colleges in Michigan, I was doing searches for sexy stripper names. I earned the reputation of the class slut by the time I had entered sixth grade. I knew the power of sexuality and that I was interested in pursuing it. I had always craved a different type of lifestyle, and once I was eighteen, I was ready.

I wanted to be a sex worker.

Growing up in the middle of nowhere was probably beneficial for my troubled mind, but I always yearned for more. The small Midwest town of Houghton, Michigan, had no mall, no clubs, no entertainment, nothing to do. As a teenager, weekend excitement mostly consisted of getting drunk in the Walmart parking lot with the other bored teenagers.

From a young age, it was clear that I was not meant to stay a small-town girl. Girls dressing slutty, doing drugs, and partying in sweaty nightclubs without a care in the worldId seen this in movies, and it all appealed to me. I knew I would never experience any of those things if I settled and stayed in Michigan. Besides, Id already had sex with all of the attractive (and even some of the not-so-attractive) boys in my town, and all of the girls already hated me either for sleeping with their boyfriends or because they were scared I was going to. It wasnt like I had friends to lose.

It was time for a change of scenery.

My dream was to become a porn star, but I decided to start small, and web-camming had always seemed like the logical place to start. To this day I still cant remember how I even found out about it, but I know I was seventeen. And when I found out I could stay home in bed and make hundreds of dollars per day, you bet I signed myself up. Of course, the camming sites denied me because I wasnt eighteen, the legal age to be naked on the Internet, but Ive always been a rule breaker and a go-getter, so I came up with my own way to do it.

I decided if I went on free camming sites and teased everyone to the point that they were begging to see me naked, they would fork over some cash to actually see a show. Which is exactly what they did. After dancing around my room in front of my laptop for five minutes, I put out a message saying:

If you want to see more, add me on MSN Messenger: princess0carmen@live.com! PAY 4 PLAY.

The amount of men I had lined up to do webcam shows for was shocking. I scheduled them back to back and performed for hours in my room until I was physically exhausted. It gave me such a rush of adrenaline doing something I wasnt supposed to be doing, but also a sense of power from being able to make money solely off my body. I refreshed my PayPal account. It jumped from the zero-dollar balance from before my hours of camming to over five hundred dollars. I was astonished to have earned that much by doing, in my opinion, pretty much nothing.

From that day forward, I laughed at the thought of working minimum-wage jobs or being a broke college student. I started logging on everyday to perform shows from my bedroom, and I couldnt believe how quickly my bank account balance was growing.

Once I turned eighteen, I signed up for every site I could possibly find. Everything was going picture perfect until the day my dad walked in on me doing a webcam show. We lived in an old house that had no locks on the bedroom doors, but since my family never bothered me, I didnt give it a second thought. Little did I know my dad would barge in on me while I was naked for strangers to watch.

Get dressed and get in my room, my dad demanded as he marched from my bedroom doorway.

I wanted to run out of the house and never come back, but I knew I had nowhere to run to. I walked into my dads room, and he was livid. Supposedly, I had been hacked. A pervert from Canada who was watching my webcam show tracked my IP address, which led him to finding my house phone number.

He called my dad and whispered creepily, Im watching your daughter fuck herself.

I started to consider moving as soon as possible. Not only was it mortifying to look my dad in the face, but after a year of nonstop web-camming, I was ready to move on to bigger and better things.

I figured the next step was to start stripping.

I hopped online and started researching the closest clubs, but there were none even remotely close to Houghton. I did find one about four hours away, though, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. After viewing the website and the reviews of the club, I quickly ruled it out as an option. The club was known for their older, overweight dancers and a commensurate lack of customers. That didnt match the glamorous image of a strip club I had in mind.

If I really wanted to move and start my new life, I only had one option: move to Florida to live with my mother, the woman Id been terrified of since as early as I could remember, the woman who, when I was a child, told me she would kill me and abused me while my dad was at work. I was shocked to find myself even considering this as a legitimate option.

I always laugh when my dad tells me the story of him sitting down with me and my younger sister to let us know they were getting a divorce. Instead of us crying like he expected, I replied, You mean we never have to see Mom again? This was followed by us cheering in excitement, and it wasnt until he told us we would still have to see her once in a while that we broke down in tears.

Why did I have to get ripped off in the mom department? I was six when my parents got divorced, the same age I started seeing a therapist. After that therapist talked to me and my sister Jessica, she reported to the court that the only way my mother should be able to see us was under court-supervised visits. Jessica is only two years younger than me and she can remember living with our mom. My youngest sister, Amanda, was only six months old at the time of the divorce, so she has no recollection of any of our moms behaviors.