by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

People's destiny - their success, joy, misery - is determined largely by those they hook up with.

It's crucial that we surround ourselves with sensible people because our brain spontaneously comes up with a lot of bad ideas that we think are good. For example, I needed to hear more Garou and Supertramp on our awesome local radio and ended up getting advised by a store clerk to buy a fancy car radio with a remote. It slipped my mind that my arms are plenty long enough to reach the radio.

So I'll tell you two local stories, one of bad guidance and one of good, and hopefully prove that guidance is everything.

Lara Roxx, aka Laura Coxx, a sultry young Cher lookalike, was just starting in the porn movie biz when on March 22 she suffered the personal disaster of being infected with HIV while filming a movie in L.A. with "actor" Darren James.

It could be argued that anybody who stars in porn films is by definition a victim of poor career counselling but she had the reasonable expectation to assume that things were being managed professionally.

She reportedly didn't want to shoot the high-risk scene (an unprotected double anal, as it is called in the business) but was told to either do it or scram and not get paid. Perhaps she should have stormed out, but financial coercion is what the workplace is all about, and it makes a lot of people do a lot of weird tasks.

Her manager Daniel Perreault - who, to his credit, has faced the music - says he doubly regrets it because, as he tells me, "I told her not to go, we thought she wasn't ready for it."

However, two of Perreault's other clients went with his blessings and were also exposed to HIV, one directly and one second generation. The blood tests for Patricia Petite and Judy Star are expected around the time we go to print. They're "very nervous," he reports.

It's a heartbreaking tale, although no sadder than those of countless others whose lives have been ended or compromised by others' carelessness. Hopefully Roxx will become a beacon of caution, and her tale will in some way make the rest of us wiser.

If, in our rational world, we've renounced fate and predestination, then we really ought to be relentlessly pragmatic about our game plans and who plays on our team.

The personification of networking in these parts is Marlene Jennings, who stayed in school and worked hard, etc., and when she wanted to replace Warren Allmand as Liberal MP for NDG, she learned that she had the friends in place to help. They organized it so she didn't have to compete to beat out the many others who wanted the job. Her husband, a Montrealer of Italian heritage, was friends with Alfonso Gagliano. In spite of being a belligerent, unpleasant and highly-questionable figure, The Fonz was Chrétien's loyal bagman and was given power over Quebec, at least enough to proclaim that Jennings would have the NDG Liberal riding.

The logic was that Canada needs both visible minorities and females in the House of Commons. Other women and blacks wanted to run in NDG but Jennings was a bonafide two-for-oner. In her backbench, Jennings hasn't exactly blazed a trail for those minorities - for example, you won't her hear pushing for a blanket amnesty for all of Canada's downtrodden illegal immigrants, something which even Bush has sorta done.

Now Jennings is returning the favour that launched her career by running interference in the Adscam hearings in which her old mentor Gagliano is accused.

Gagliano is gone but the friends network that propels Canada's top elites is still going strong. Separatist-turned-federalist (don't you just love these guys?) Jean Lapierre is now going over the heads of several local Liberal riding associations by appointing his own candidates for the upcoming federal elections.

Two women, two destinies, one message: choose your friends carefully. When we choose our friends, mentors and associates, we're hooking into a power system. Sometimes it makes things run smoothly, other times it just blows stuff up.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca