Hot tubs! Hair-pulling! Boy-on-boy wrestling! Tila Tequila turned an MTV dating show into a gender-bending free-for-all. She’s 4 feet, 11 inches of trouble and 180 proof that reality is what you make it.
Tila Tequila. Boy, is there truth in
that namesake: stuff that sends your spirits
soaring, gets you acting like a moron, then leaves you sick and full of shame
the next day. After blazing into fame as a MySpace sensation—where her soft-core
photos and diligent accessibility won her a fame-launching 2 million
friends—Tila is now enjoying a new kind of celebrity: an obscure object of
desire, playing havoc with young libidos on
A
Shot at Love, the highest-rated show on MTV last year. With
A Shot at Love, Tila has become a bona fide
American phenomenon, a lightning rod for national discussions about gender and
desire, reality and illusion, mud-wrestling and Jell-O shots.
“Love”—or
at least its ADD-plagued, MySpace-floating avatar—is the engine of this
particularly cutting-edge reality show. Like
Flavor of and
Rock of,
A
Shot at Love assembles an array of twentysomething exhibitionists to
cohabitate, lounge about in swimwear, compete in messy challenges and try to win
the sole affections of the star. Its deceptively simple twists are that a) the
star is not an aging neo-Hefner but a young bisexual woman; and b) the
competitors, both male and female, genuinely lose their minds.
There’s no
sign of pathology at first. But by episode four, a rejected male schoolteacher
has been bounced from the house for brawling with a rival and is banging on
windows and lowing like a steer. By episode six, a rejected dancer has leaped
upon a blond rival to yank her hair, gotten dragged off by producers and dropped
sobbing on the carpet. All the while, the phrase “I’m in love with Tila” gets
tossed around like “Where’s my sunscreen?”—a testament to the irresistible,
omnisexual, brain-addling magnetism of a four-foot-eleven enigma wrapped in a
thong bikini and named after a Mexican liquor.
So it’s not without some
fear that
Blender comes calling on this
Tila Tequila. If the show is any indication, there’s a serious danger that we,
too, will fall in love with her.
We arrange to meet in public, in the
lounge of a posh Atlanta hotel. A jazz trio plays John Coltrane’s “Moment’s
Notice,” and lilacs fill the tables around us, as Nguyen, suited for later duty
as party hostess, enters to sit demurely across a table by the wall—so chosen
for its relative inaccessibility to Tila freaks. Right off the bat,
Blender shares our concern about falling for
this succubus of reality TV.
“You mean you’re not in love with me yet?”
asks Nguyen, mock scandalized. “Well, maybe after we kiss.”
In person,
Nguyen comes off smarter and cooler than the somewhat eerie prize-girl she plays
on
A Shot at Love. “She’s so magnetic,
and she has got a brain on her, “ says Linda Strawberry, an L.A. musician who
met Nguyen through Billy Corgan four years ago and soon became her best friend.
“The perception of her is this crazy bikini model, but she’s a lot different
from her public persona.”
Tonight, she looks
Blender in the eye, Tila laughs easily and
loudly, and obligingly explains some tattoos. One on her shoulder depicts a
winged musical note sitting atop crossed machine guns. “Those symbolize my time
growing up in Texas,” she says of the gats. “They represent that hard lifestyle
I used to live, and the music represents my new life, where I’m more feminine
and there’s more hope.”
Born October 24, 1981, in Singapore, Tila grew up
in Houston after her parents moved there that same year. She describes her
family as “a little fucked up” and her childhood as being full of fights,
rebellion and insecurity. “My parents were really struggling with their life,
working at the swap meet in Texas,” she says. “I worked there with them. When
other kids used to sleep, I’d have to wake up at 6 in the morning to help them
set up outside. And I was embarrassed growing up. I was very popular at school,
but no one knew that I was very poor. So I had these two lifestyles that I had
to keep up.”
Wayward school years took her into petty crime, drugs. At
16, she ran away to New York, then moved to Hollywood and began modeling for
Playboy and working as a bikini model at car shows. She turned her energy to the
still-nascent world of social media, dominating it with a distinctive mix of
sex, candor and friend-adds. By 2006, she had more friends than anyone on Earth,
but, she says, no love. The characters on her leg that say
SUMMER
LOVE are there, she explains, “because I’d always find a love over the
summer, and then it would be over.”