“What’s gotten into you?” I asked.
“Are you fucking my dad?” She glared at me with pure hatred.
I stood there shocked for a moment. “Jesus Christ, Vanessa. What are you talking about?”
“My dad told me you were fucking him!” she said. “You are such white trash, Jenna. How could you?”
I had never planned on telling Vanessa anything, but the mind does funny things when it’s put on the defensive. “You’ve got it wrong,” I told her flatly. “Actually, he raped me.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, Vanessa burst into tears and crumpled to the floor.
“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I’m not going to turn him in. I won’t do anything, all right?”
“That’s not it,” she gasped through her sobs. I looked at her and suddenly, I knew. Not only had she been through the same thing with Preacher, but she was still going through it.
“He’s been raping me my whole life,” she confessed and then just exploded. Tears flew out of her eyes, snot gushed from her nose, and her wails pierced my eardrum. All the defensive walls she had put up from being victimized her whole life suddenly crumbled in front of me. He was her father; he still had control over her.
“That bastard is creeping around here again, and I don’t think I can handle it,” she said. “I’ve spent too much of my life trying to find the strength to stand up to him.”
She buried her face in her knees. Her blond hair streamed over her legs. “My first memory is him coming into my room and climbing into bed with me,” she said, her voice muffled. “And he never stopped. He broke into the house and climbed into the shower with me last week. It’s been going on for so long I don’t know what to do.”
We talked for hours. Actually, she mostly talked. I just listened. She didn’t need any advice; she simply needed to tell someone about all the times he would wake her in the middle of the night, trying to touch her and fuck her. Often people make the mistake of thinking that when others open up to them, they are looking for advice. But actually, they’ve heard the same advice hundreds of times and never acted on it. Logically, they know the advice is right, but emotionally they can’t tear themselves away from their set patterns. And emotions always overpower thoughts. So I let Vanessa talk, and watched as the anger, confusion, and impotence slowly settled in her, so that she could go to sleep that night.
Worst of all, she had told Jack about it. And what did Jack do? The same thing he had done when I told him about my rape: nothing. It pissed me off so much: he loved Vanessa as much as I did. How could he not stand up for her?
“I swear to God I can’t believe my family is betraying me,” she said. “I just want to get my life back.”
I felt so helpless listening to her. I had never gone to the police to report my rape because it would just have been my word against his; but I told Vanessa we could go together. However, she said she just wasn’t ready to face the shame of everyone knowing. Before I left, she promised to confront her father and put a stop to it. I hugged her until we both couldn’t cry anymore.
The next day she was dead.
What made it so hard was that I felt I hadn’t been there for Vanessa. As soon as I saw her hanging from the shower, I realized that I should have stayed with her. But, strangely, I didn’t cry. Even though I was freaking out on the inside, I stayed calm, just like my father would have, while Sharon returned with the knife to cut her down. My father had always described his mental state during shootouts as extremely crisp and lucid, as if everything were moving in slow motion. And that’s how it was for me.
Sharon ran around like a psycho while I kept telling her, “Cut her down!”
When Sharon finally did, Vanessa came toppling down on me with a loud hissing sound, like air escaping. I thought that maybe she had just breathed, maybe I could save her. I slid out from under her and laid her on the bathroom floor. Her tongue was hanging out and there was foam all over her face. Her skin began breaking out in purple, blotchy patches before my eyes.
I wiped the foam from around her mouth with toilet paper, which kept flaking off and leaving white pieces of tissue all over her face. I tried to place her tongue in a normal position as I bent over her mouth. Sharon just stood there, with her own mouth hanging open. Over the music, I could hear Frou Frou still barking outside. She was panicking too.
“Jesus, call 911 or something!” I shouted at Sharon.
I had never actually performed CPR, but in an emergency situation, it’s amazing how you just automatically know what to do. I pinched her nose and breathed into her mouth, then leaned over her chest with my full body weight and pumped it with my hands clasped over her heart. When Sharon returned, I told her to rub Vanessa’s arms and legs to get her circulation going. I’m sure this all would have been very helpful if it hadn’t already been far too late.
When the police and paramedics arrived, they pronounced her dead after five minutes.
“It’s really strange,” one of the paramedics told me. “Because she doesn’t look dead.”
I looked at Vanessa, and the color had returned to her skin. The purple blotches had even started to fade back to flesh. Only a pooling of blood that had settled and flattened out the skin of her back along the floor betrayed the reality of the situation. “Well,” I told him, “that’s because we’ve been rubbing her for the last ten minutes trying to get her circulation going.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “You two worked her blood back to the surface.”
Sharon and I waited there while they called Preacher, who arrived with Jack. He told the police that she had been doing a lot of drugs lately and had lost her mind. Instantly, a light went off in my head. That motherfucker. After all Vanessa had been through, she wasn’t the type of person to just give up like this. What clinched it was when Preacher told the police that he didn’t want a drug test or even an autopsy.
I imagined him and Vanessa arguing, and her threatening to go to the cops. I looked at his hairy-knuckled hands and thought about how easy it must have been for him to strangle her; how cold-blooded he must have been to hang his own daughter afterward to fake a suicide. But I just stood there silently, wishing I had the guts to say something. That guy intimidated the fuck out of me.
Two days later, her mother, Sadie, flew in from Michigan for her funeral. I stood there, watching everyone weep for her, but I still couldn’t bring myself to shed a tear. She had suffered for so many years, and no one had ever cared or helped in any way. And now, when it was too late to do anything, they were putting on this great show of love and remorse. It seemed so hypocritical. But, more than that, it seemed eerily familiar, and I realized that my life would probably also end with everyone caring too much too late.
I wanted to stay strong. If I lost it over Vanessa, I felt like I would unravel entirely from all the things I had never dealt with: the death of my mother, leaving my father, Preacher raping me, and my anger at Jack for doing nothing about his uncle. So I just kept everything pent up inside, like I always did. It was such a terrible end to her hard life. And she was such a great girl inside that it didn’t seem fair. At best, she was better off, because she didn’t have to live in the same world as her father anymore. Since then, not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought of Vanessa and the look on her face when I last saw her.
The next day, I sat in Vanessa’s bedroom with her mother, going through Vanessa’s possessions. There were so many little things that I wanted to keep as reminders of her friendship and beauty. But her mom, who had never been there for her before, took everything. All she left me with was a little antique sake set, which I keep in my bedroom to this day.
Afterward, I discussed Vanessa’s death with some of the women around the tattoo shop, most of whom had heard stories about Preacher molesting girls.
“Somebody needs to do something about it,” they kept saying.
Even though they had no idea what had happened on the boat, I felt like
they were talking to me. But, after all my character-building in the strip club, after all I had learned about the world and myself, I realized that I was still a little girl. I just didn’t have the strength.
My first adult convention—the Consumer Electronics Show.
After the funeral, Jack finally began to put some distance between Preacher and himself. He quit the tattoo shop and decided to open one of his own, along with a rival biker club, with Matt. As for investors, they found one: me. I had saved tens of thousands of dollars from stripping. There were only so many pairs of shoes I could buy. So not only did I give him my money, but I learned to lay tile, drywall, and solder. I was in the shop every waking hour, and there were lots of them because of the meth I was doing to numb myself after Vanessa’s death.
In January, we finally finished the tattoo parlor. It was set to open on February 1. That morning, we arrived at the shop and it was gone. The roof was blown off, the windows were shattered, and the tiles I had worked so hard on were dust and debris. Three fire engines and a police car were parked outside.
Someone, it seemed, had fire-bombed the shop. And Jack and I both knew who that someone was.
One of the worst things you can do in the biker community is start a competing club. Preacher had connections with organized crime, I was told, and if I wanted to live, I should stay away from anything to do with tattoo parlors and biker clubs while Jack rebuilt his.
So I buried myself in work, stripping for thirteen hours a day, making ridiculous bank. It was depressing without Vanessa there to support and distract me. Now, as soon as I walked into the club each afternoon, I could see the competition, envy, and petty hatred in the eyes of the other girls.
People often say that the world would be so much better if it were run by women. But women have as many faults as men. Their faults are just different. So the truth is that the world would not be better if it were run by a woman, it would be better if it were run by the right woman. When men race or fight, they are only striving to prove their masculinity or protect their sense of pride. But women do not compartmentalize in the same way. Our actions are a reflection of our complete selves, worthiness, and deservedness. For the worst of our species, any other attractive female is seen as competition and a threat.
Thus, without Vanessa, I had no friends at the club. One afternoon, though, I noticed a girl I hadn’t seen before. She was sitting on the side of a small stage in the back of the room. A single spotlight shone down on her, casting her in an angelic glow. While most of the strippers at the club wore cheesy neon-green tube tops or American-flag bikinis, she was wearing an expensive-looking black French lace bra with matching panties. A lace shawl was wrapped around her shoulders, and a soft, perfectly straight, raven-black cascade of hair fell over them; she had a tiny waist, a plump round butt, and boobs like cupcakes with beautiful little cherries on top. But what really made her stand out was her posture: so perfect, like a Japanese geisha, as if she belonged to a gentler, more refined world. When she noticed me looking at her, she didn’t flash a look of hatred or territorialism like most girls in the club would. She just looked down demurely. I could not figure out what this sweet, classy girl was doing here.
By the end of the night, I had worked up the courage to talk to her. She was sitting in a booth in the corner of the club, where I joined her. “You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life,” I told her.
“Tell the men that,” she sighed. “Everyone wants to marry me, but no one wants a dance.” She grabbed a handful of twenty-dollar bills out of her purse, and put them down on the table. I estimated that there were five of them. And at this point in my stripper days, I was very good at estimating these things.
“That’s all I made tonight,” she said. “And it was a good night.”
I had made almost four thousand dollars from my regulars.
“With your looks, you could be one of the top girls in the club,” I told her.
“That’s just not me,” she said. “I feel totally out of place doing this.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
She was even more beautiful up close.
“I’m doing it,” she said, and paused, “because it pays my bills.”
I decided that it was my duty to teach her the ropes, as Vanessa had done for me. “I was just like you when I came here,” I said. “I was the shyest girl you ever met. And do you know how I succeeded? Do you know the cliche, fake it until you make it? Well, it’s true. If you act like the prize stripper who charges fifty dollars for a dance, eventually the guys are going to start paying you fifty dollars for a dance. And then one hundred dollars. And then two hundred dollars.”
I talked to her for fifteen minutes, schooling her on the ins and outs, the dos and don’ts, the shouldn’ts that you shouldn’t and the shouldn’ts that you should. “It’s not real life in here. It’s a game, one big game of mind fucking. If you’re somewhat in tune with other people and can pick up on what they are thinking and who they are by talking to them, then you can win. You may not be a manipulative person deep inside, but in here you must manipulate. And you will learn that you can get anything you want by maneuvering correctly.”
I felt proud of myself, like I was the seasoned professional dispensing wisdom and advice to a new girl who needed it. As I was talking, she suddenly reached across the table, put her hand under my chin, pulled my face into hers, and kissed me.
It wasn’t a peck on the lips, or one of those fake sexy kisses that girls do with other girls to turn men on. It was a full-on tongue-exploring-mouth soul kiss. My breath quickened, and my mind raced. I was in shock. But, at the same time, I wasn’t. This was why I had really come up to her. I didn’t want to help her become a better stripper at all. I wanted to run my hands through her hair, feel her cheek against mine, and hold her in my arms. I had to make a split-second decision. And that decision was yes. Yes, I wanted to throw down with this girl.
She released my mouth and looked softly into my eyes. I wrapped my right hand behind her head, and she pressed her lips once more against mine. She kissed with the confidence and passion of a man. She slid her hand along my thigh, under my short white skirt, and let it rest in the waistband of my panties. I responded by sinking my fingers into the depths of the hair at the back of her neck, closing my hand into a fist, and pulling her head back. She moaned with such animal desire that I instantly let go. I couldn’t believe that this demure girl had such a fierceness inside her. As it came to the surface, I could feel my panties moisten. The best sex takes place in the mind first.
“Do you want to continue this someplace more private,” she whispered, her eyes moist, her breath rising in time with mine. We were in our own world now, and I wanted to stay there.
As she unlocked the door to her house, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I’d never been with a girl before, and never thought I would be. Sure, I’d entertain Jack by making out with a girl in front of him, but this was different. This was just me and another girl, alone, one on one, for no one else’s pleasure but our own.
As soon as we walked in the door, she put her hands around my neck, threw me up against the wall, and rammed her tongue down my throat. If a man had done this, I would have been terrified. But coming from her, it was such a turn-on. She lifted my shirt over my shoulders and began to lick slowly around my breasts, circling closer and closer to my nipples, as she ran her hands along the curve of my back. Her tongue and touch felt so much different than a man’s. She was just as confident and strong, yet underneath was a gentle, nurturing touch that sent shivers through my body. I was hooked, and because it was a woman, the thought that I was cheating on Jack never crossed my mind.
She led me to the bedroom and pulled my skirt off. My panties were so damp that I was embarrassed. Sitting over me, she pulled off her top, unhooked her bra, and pressed herself against me. I could feel heat emanating from every pore of her body. It had been so long since I had felt this kind of intimacy.
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br /> The cover of my movie Pure.
She kissed me for what seemed like forever before working her way down my skin, kissing every inch. She reached my thighs, then stopped and cupped her hand over my pussy. Just feeling the sheer warmth of it—after so much teasing—made me want to explode. When she finally went down on me, I was practically crawling up the walls. She put one finger inside, working my g-spot, as she licked my clit. She looked up at me, her chin damp with my wetness, and asked whether I minded if she used a toy. I said no, imagining that she had some sort of thin red vibrator that she wanted to rub against my clit. But instead she reached under the bed and whipped out a cream-colored back massager with a long, thick handle and a top that looked like a showerhead. Involuntarily, my whole body tensed. I was petrified.
She placed a blanket over my pussy so that the vibrations wouldn’t be too intense and direct, and I began to relax. Clearly, I was in the hands of a qualified professional. She turned her monstrous apparatus on, and just touched it to the blanket over my clit. My body started to twitch and shudder uncontrollably, forcing me to arch my back until it happened. I exploded, over and over again. I couldn’t stop. It felt like wave after wave of color was running through me. Every time I thought it was over, my body would rock with another set of spasms and I’d dig my fingers deeper into her neck and yell every curse word in the dictionary, in addition to some I invented on the spot.
When it was over, I collapsed and started laughing, and then crying, and then laughing and crying at the same time. It was as if my body were recovering from a traumatic shock. She crawled up and hugged me, stroked my hair, and then licked the tears off my face. I had never had an orgasm that intense in my life.
We rolled around together for hours that night, alternating moments of tender caresses with hair-ripping lust. She had a full arsenal of toys under her bed—none of which I’d ever experimented with before—and seemed to know everything that was possible for one woman to do to another. When I went down on her, she screamed so loudly and thrashed around so violently that she actually broke her bedside lamp. The neighbors must have thought she was being murdered.
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale Page 5