How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

by Jameson, Jenna

  I felt so useless: I literally exhausted everything I could do. When she was sleeping, I’d go into the living room and stare at a TV that wasn’t on. I’d just sit there and vacillate between wanting her to live, even if she had to live like that, and wanting her to die. After she did die, I felt guilty for years for having those thoughts.

  I kept telling myself, “I spent ninety days in a dirt hole in Africa waiting to be executed. If I can handle that, I can handle this. I’m going to be okay. She’s going to be okay.”

  But it just got worse. The last couple of weeks she was barely lucid because of all the morphine. The night she died I was sitting in the living room, staring at the blank TV screen, when I heard her gagging. I ran into the room and her body was convulsing violently. I tilted her head back to open her airway and give her CPR. I’m sorry, Jenna. I have to stop writing for a moment and collect myself. I’ve never told anybody this.

  Okay.

  She started gurgling and aspirating, and then went quiet. I knew she was gone. I felt the artery in her neck. It had stopped. I opened her right eye and it was fully dilated. Then I went to the living room and called an ambulance. As soon as you heard the siren, you started screaming. Tony came into the hallway, and I grabbed him and put him back in his room and shut the door. I didn’t want either of you to see your mother like that. I think those things stick with you, whether you are aware of them or not.

  You never wanted to be alone after that. And you became afraid of the dark. You would always sleep in your brother’s room with the lights on. You weren’t even two, Jenna, but subconsciously I think you remember her talking to you while she was sick. I think to some degree you blocked out the memories.

  For me, everything changed dramatically after Judy was gone. My mother and Judy’s mother came over the night she died, but her mother left right away. So my mom and a friend of hers stayed and cleaned everything out. I couldn’t touch her stuff. I went into the room a couple days later, and it was like she never existed.

  Before your mother died, we were a close family. We had big Thanksgiving dinners at her family’s house and we all got along great. But after she died, everyone abandoned us. We never saw her family or mine. They didn’t even come to her funeral: all the pallbearers were my friends. Judy’s parents took you guys out once, but they brought you back in fifteen minutes. They couldn’t stand being reminded of your mother. They would call you Judy all the time.

  The bank didn’t even wait for her to get cold before they seized everything we had. I owed half a million dollars in hospital bills, so they came with a moving truck and a tow truck. They took two cars, a boat, a motorcycle, all my stock, and an apartment building I owned in North Las Vegas. They even took your toys. And I was still $24,000 in debt. All I had was you, Tony, and $3,000 in cash. That was it.

  We moved into a trailer. I never thought we’d end up in a trailer. No one stopped by and the phone never rang. People don’t want to be around death and grief. It’s one of those things a person has to go through on their own. It was such a daunting future without her, Jenna. For a year, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a challenge just walking and chewing gum at the same time.

  Do you remember going to her gravesite with me? I used to take you and Tony there every Sunday for a couple years, but then I felt that it was too debilitating for you. And for me. I was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion. I developed facial tics that didn’t go away until years afterward.

  That woman was my life. There was nobody else in the world for me. And I’ve never been able to recover from that loss. Never. You spend the rest of your life searching. And then you get to a certain point and you give up. I stumbled around for six years just trying to be happy again, trying to figure out how to raise you and your brother. But slowly I learned. And the most important thing I learned was to love being a father.

  Anyway, I am looking forward to coming out to Phoenix for your wedding to Jay in June. I think you’ve finally picked a good one.

  Love,

  Dad

  P.S. You asked about your childhood diary and, believe it or not, I found it. I’ll bring it with me.

  Christmas in Panama City, in 1977.

  Date: June 20, 2003

  Time: 1 P.M.

  Place: Living room, Tony Massoli residence, Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S.A.

  People: Jenna Jameson

  Tony Massoli, her brother

  Larry Massoli, her father

  Selena Massoli, wife of Tony

  Jenna: The way I look at it is, I feel proud of us for making it.

  Tony: No kidding.

  Jenna: ‘Cause I look back at some of that stuff and I’m like, “Wow!”

  Larry: It was a prescription for failure.

  Jenna: Absolutely.

  Larry: What happened is that after your mother died, I couldn’t do TV anymore. I had always wanted to be a cop, but your mom refused to let me. So I waited about a year and then decided to do what I had always wanted to do. I became this big crusader asshole. Because I couldn’t save your mother, I was going to save the world. It was probably a culture shock to you two when I changed jobs.

  Tony: I was a kid, so from my perspective that part of our childhood was unbelievable. Dad was busting the whorehouses, so the mob wanted to kidnap me and Jenna. They thought they could extort my dad into staying out of their business. So one of the mob guys picked up Jenna after school in a yellow schoolbus. He let off all the other kids and kept Jenna on the bus. He drove just with her for miles and miles. The deputies and the sheriff’s department chased him, and finally pulled the bus over and got Jenna.

  Jenna: I was in preschool, so I barely remember that.

  Tony: Oh, it was bad. Those guys pulled up next to me in a Cadillac one day and said, “Your dad, Larry, said for you to come home with us.” I knew something was wrong so I chucked my book bag and took off running through the desert. I hid in a drainage ditch. After I heard the car drive away, I still waited in there for a couple of hours.

  Jenna: I remember when you came home from that, panting. That was a crazy time. We had police escorts after that. When I went to school, there was always a cop.

  Larry: It was very scary at that time. They had put a contract out on me. I was so worried about the kids. What happened was that a guy named Walter Plankinton had opened a place called the Chicken Ranch, and a couple of cronies from a rival bordello came and burned the place down. So my lieutenant told me, “You are going to get a call to go to the other side of the valley. When you get that call just do what you’re told and wait it out, no matter what happens.”

  And I said, “Not on my watch.” So I kept them from getting revenge. I refused to take bribes or turn a blind eye to anything illegal, so everybody wanted to chase me out of town. It was like the Old West out there, and they didn’t want anyone trying to tackle the corruption.

  Tony: Remember when we had to go hide out in Johnny Whitmore’s attic?

  Jenna: I forgot about that.

  Tony: I was sleeping in the dining room at the time, on a day bed. And I heard a crunching on the rocks, so I knew someone was out there. I looked outside and I saw a shadow. So I went to dad’s room. He was married to Marjorie then.

  Larry: Oh, Christ, Marjorie. I needed someone to help me with the kids. That was a mistake.

  Tony: So I knocked on their door, and Marjorie was like, “Shut the fuck up. Go back to bed.” I looked out the window and saw this guy in a bandanna, and he was wearing gloves and had a brick in his hand. I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. Then the brick came right through the window. And you came running out buck naked and grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and ran through the front door shooting. The gun lit up the night, and all I could hear was the brrrraaaaappp brrrraaaaappp from the machine gun.

  Larry: He got away, so I put my uniform on and code three’d it over to the Shamrock, which was one of the brothels that had fire-bombed the Chicken Ranch. I drove the patrol car through the front door
and unloaded two clips into the bar with that Thompson submachine gun. Then I said, “I want you fuckers to stop fucking with my family.” And we never had a problem after that.

  Jenna: I remember when they tapped the phone. I was so little at that time and didn’t understand what was going on. There was a big window in my room, and I would sit on my tiny bed with the curtains open, arms around my knees, looking outside for hours because I had trouble sleeping.

  Larry: It was a huge window and it was empty out there, so you could see every star.

  Jenna: I would just gaze at the stars. And dad came in my room and said, “Jenna—get in bed! Don’t you ever look out that window!” He was so stern about it. I had no idea why he was so mad.

  Larry: I was afraid they would shoot at the house. It was very dangerous at that time. I had the government against me, the Mafia against me. I had no one to help and no place to take you. So you had a very wild childhood because I was always in the shit. We were going through a nanny a week. I couldn’t keep people hired no matter what I did.

  Tony: We were supposed to stay home, but we had that one babysitter who wanted to go to the store. And we were like, “If we are going, we want to ride in the front seat.” The backseat got so hot in Vegas. So she said, “Yeah, sure.” We went through a green light and, bam, we got hit. T-boned. The other car was doing about fifty. Our car flipped over and, bang, there was busted glass everywhere. And, remember, the fireman took us out of there just before the car caught fire?

  Jenna: And they said that if we had been in the backseat, we would have been dead.

  Larry: I used to hire a Hawaiian couple to live in the house and babysit them. I tried not to work such long hours after Judy died, but it was difficult. So one night I came home around eight o’clock and Tony looked a little ragged. I asked what was wrong, and he said, “John and Marsha took us to a casino and they went in and gambled.” And I said, “What did you do that whole time?”

  Jenna: We sat in the car in the parking lot for like eight hours.

  Larry: The couple were still at our house waiting to get paid, so I went in and dragged that son of a bitch out of there and whipped his ass.

  Jenna: Yeah, it was brutal.

  Larry: And then some company I hired a nanny from sent me someone from a mental institution. I didn’t know. And she called me up at the office and said, “Since you’re gone all the time, I don’t see any reason why I can’t drown these kids.”

  Tony: Yeah, that was the one who made me brush her hair for hours.

  Larry: I drove 120 miles an hour on the way home. I got there and Jenna was in her little stroller with this mental institution son of a bitch behind her. I put this woman in the car and drove her to the mental institution that I found out she was from. When I got back to the house, there were Cheerios everywhere for some mysterious reason. That’s when I decided I had to get married.

  With my dad in Boulder City, 1982.

  Larry: I met Marjorie when I was working at the TV station. She was a publicist, and she had been after me even when I was married. So I decided to take her out a couple times for dinner. I thought, “I need help so bad.” So I eventually asked her to marry me.

  Jenna: Yeah, Dad could never cook. He couldn’t even make instant oatmeal.

  Larry: To this day I still can’t make it—or boil water.

  Jenna: Tony and I would be like, “How do we tell Dad that we can’t eat this?” He would make us cheese sandwiches until we had cheese coming out of our ears.

  Tony: Dad worked all night, and it seemed like all day too. And Marjorie worked until nine. There was never anything to eat.

  Jenna: I remember Marjorie used to buy herself a personal stash of Yoplait yogurt.

  Larry: That dirty son of a bitch. I had forgotten that.

  Jenna: And she would not let us eat it. We knew if we ate it, we would get in trouble, so we would starve. I used to microwave pasta. When it came out, it was still hard. And I’d put sour cream and tuna on it, trying to get some kind of nutrition.

  Larry: When I found out that Marjorie wasn’t feeding you, I was so mad.

  Tony: Everything in the fridge was earmarked for her.

  Jenna: And we were so frigging hungry. I remember sitting and looking in the fridge at those yogurts. That’s burned in my mind.

  Larry: Why didn’t you just take one?

  Jenna: She would have slapped me the fuck up, dad. If she said something and I went “bleah,” she would reach across the table and backhand me across the face. It got to the point where I was too scared to say anything. One of our favorite things to do was get those vials of cinnamon, and dip toothpicks in the cinnamon.

  Tony: That’s right, and then we’d sell them.

  Jenna: Marjorie lost her mind when she found out. Remember, she threw the coffeepot at us?

  Larry: She did? You never told me that.

  Jenna: Finally one day, Tony and I were so frigging hungry we called Grandma. “Grandma, we’re hungry. We’ve been hungry for a couple of months, Grandma.”

  Tony: She was a raging alcoholic. Whatever she had to eat was readymade: tapioca pudding, microwaveable food, popcorn. So she came and got us, and we got to her house and she gave us Hostess Cherry Pies. Then she went in the bedroom and got in her nightgown, and then she had us go in the bedroom and get in her nightgowns.

  Jenna: Yeah, we wore her nightgowns. Tony was in a satin nightgown. (Laughs)

  With Dad on Lake Mead at age eleven.

  Larry: And you know, we haven’t been able to break him of them.

  Tony: Yeah, I still like them (laughs), but only with pumps. Anyway, she poured herself a full glass of bourbon after dinner. She just drank it and then, boom, she passed out right into the coffee table. The glass shattered everywhere and she didn’t move. So we called Dad and said, “We’re staying at Grandma’s.” And we played over her lifeless body for hours.

  Jenna: We never wanted to leave Grandma’s house.

  Tony: She never ate. She just drank.

  Larry: Eventually, I got offered a job in Panama City, Florida. We needed to get out of Vegas. It was too dangerous. I also wanted to go to the police academy in Panama City, because they send you to college and all that kind of stuff.

  Jenna: That’s when you got the brown Firebird. Do you remember where I used to sleep? Behind the seat. I was so tiny that I slept on the floor of the car, with my head on the hump.

  Larry: You’ve always been easily stored. We drove all the way to Panama City and got caught in the hurricane. Once we made it into Arizona, all Jenna said every fifteen minutes, was …

  Jenna: “Are we there yet?”

  Larry: “No, we aren’t, honey.”

  With Wanna, my grandma on my dad’s side.

  BOYS #1

  Name: Sam

  Age: 5

  Location: Panama City, Florida

  Status: Neighbor

  Boundary Crossed: Nudity

  It was my idea.

  I wanted to see what a pee-pee looked like. I knew my dad had one, because whenever he went tinkle, I could see a dangling bit from the back. Thus I knew boys were different from girls; I just wanted to see how different. So I asked the boy next door to play doctor.

  He and his sister had bunk beds. We’d hide underneath them and take turns pulling down our pants and touching each other. He turned out to be a little perv also. He always wanted to rub it on me. It wasn’t anything malicious or dirty. In fact, it was warm and felt good. But our games didn’t last long; one afternoon, his parents found us naked under the bed and sent me home. They never let me come over after that. And I can’t say I blame them.

  From then on, I did my exploring alone. At age six, thanks to the jets of a neighbor’s Jacuzzi, I discovered that I could have an orgasm. I would prop myself up against the stream until my hips locked up and my skin shriveled. Each orgasm would twitch through my body for what felt like fifteen minutes. Years later, I discovered I could replicate the effect with the bathtu
b faucet. It took me several months of sleepless nights before I learned how to get off with just my hand. I didn’t consciously associate my orgasms with sexuality at that time. The tragedy is that by the time I finally did, my orgasms had become much shorter.

  Tony and me in Florida.

  Larry: You always lived in great houses. You always had swimming pools. You always had great cars. You always dressed the best.

  Jenna: I don’t know about that, Dad.

  Larry: To me you did. At least, as much as a $40,000 a year policeman could give you. I guess Florida was awful.

  Jenna: Ugh, Florida was ghetto.

  Tony: I remember going to school and it was so bad. There was a barbed-wire fence around the courtyard. All the tricycles were chained to a pole in the middle so the kids wouldn’t steal them. So the only way you could play with them was if everyone got on their tricycles in unison because they were all tied together. I was in shock. I sat back and went, “Oh my God.”

  Larry: Marjorie was a police dispatcher and I was a police officer. She was in another town. So we were both gone a lot.

  Jenna: We ran the frigging streets and stayed out all night. It was awesome.

  Larry: You were little.

  Jenna: I was four, Dad. I was this little tub of lard running behind Tony. Every night we’d be out front in that huge big grass area.

  Larry: Was that when you got your head caught in the …

  Jenna: … staircase? That was me. They had to cut me out. We had these cement steps outside leading to the apartments. And guess who dared me to stick my head between them?

  Tony: Of course. Let me tell you. I tried everything to get you out. I even buttered your head. We were screwed.

  Jenna: What happens is, when you get something stuck, it swells automatically. So he was pulling and I was yelling, “Noooooo.”

  Tony: Then I tried pouring melted butter in your ear. But it was still hot, and you screamed even more.