Jenna: A fireman had to come and cut me out of the stairs. Tony was always doing things like that to me.
Larry: Do you remember when I had a shoot-out at the Alexander apartments?
Tony: Yeah.
Larry: I got the call, and it was in my district. There was a guy in our parking lot firing a gun. And we shot him right there.
Jenna: Do you remember the guy who had the apartment upstairs? I used to go up there all the time. He was a grown man, and he used to tell me that he was Charlie Daniels. He wore a cowboy hat. And I would go up to his apartment and play his guitar. He would make me a sandwich, and we would hang out and listen to the radio.
Larry: How come I didn’t know that?
Jenna: Because I knew I’d get in trouble if you knew. But I was so hungry. I’d ask him, “Can I have a mayonnaise sammich please?” I thought, “I know Charlie Daniels, man, and he makes me mayonnaise sandwiches every day.”
Larry: It could have been John Wayne Gacy.
Jenna: It could have been. But he was so super good to me. He would give me little trinkets, like statues and stuff. I would go and hide them, because Marjorie used to throw out all my shit.
Larry: The only person in the apartment you guys ever had any problems with was that boy Glen.
Tony: That sixth-grader Glen?
Jenna: Yeah, the guy who shut my head in the sliding glass door.
Larry: I think that was your first big fight.
Tony: Every day after school that kid would tackle me, get on my stomach, and punch me until my nose bled.
Larry: Tony finally came and told me. I opened the front door and I said, “You go down there and stomp his ass. And if you haven’t done that, then don’t come home, because I’m stomping your ass.”
Tony: I planned it out like a military mission. I skipped school and waited for him all day. He thought I was homesick. When he got off the school bus, he came underneath the staircase. And as soon as he passed under me, I dropped a big brick right on his head. Whack. And then I dragged him to the side of the building and just started socking him. All of the adults came out and tried to stop me, but my dad came out in his police uniform and said, “None of you people touch my kid. This other kid beats him up every day, and I’m letting him take care of the problem.”
Jenna: We actually became friends with him after that.
Larry: One of the best stories about you two was when that guy tried to touch Jenna while you all were playing leapfrog.
Tony: Yeah, Ken. He touched her pee-pee, or tried to.
Larry: So you went over to the house—without telling me anything—and knocked on the door. The father answered and you said, “Is Ken home? Can he come out?” And as soon as Ken came out, you tore him up.
Tony: And then someone tried to feel up Jenna in school. Remember, I came to beat him up while his class was still going on? I was beating him and the teacher came running over and started choking me against the wall. So I punched her out.
Jenna: It was Mrs. Bland.
Larry: How do you remember that?
Tony: And then the principal came and the librarian tackled me. I was never allowed on those school grounds again.
Jenna: It was always a constant thing of you protecting me.
Tony: Why did we have to fight so much?
Jenna: But we had fun though. We had so much fun.
Tony: It sounds horrible but it really wasn’t.
Larry: Every time we were around Jenna, we ended up punching someone.
Tony: It’s still true.
Jenna: Marjorie was awful. It was like the evil stepmom. She was always angry with us, maybe because we were left over from Dad’s other life before her.
Tony: She walked really heavily when she was mad. And we were always so scared of her. She would scream and yell and bang the doors of cabinets.
Jenna: We had a very large Doberman named Ming, and Marjorie would accuse me—a girl—of peeing on the walls. Even at that age I could reason there was no way I could pee on the walls. Maybe on the carpet but not on the wall. I told her that I didn’t do it. And she was like, “You are lying to me and I’m going to spank you. You have a choice: I can spank you inside or outside in front of people.” And I was like, “You aren’t going to spank me. No, no, no.” She grabbed me, pulled my pants down, took me outside, and spanked me with a hairbrush until I bled. I couldn’t sit down I was hurt so bad.
Larry: You told me about that. Marjorie and I had a huge fight afterward.
Jenna: She was so angry with me after that. If I said something sassy, like any kid does, she would reach across the table and smack me across the face. You don’t do that to a child. I was a little thing. I was being punished constantly for everything. But the scary part was that I loved her because she was all I really knew as a mom. I constantly wanted her approval but I never got it.
Larry: Well, she was just an idiot.
Tony: She was just a bitch. Remember the time I had an asthma attack on the way home from school, and I didn’t have my inhaler.
Jenna: You came home and were beating on the door and saying, “I’m dying of asthma.” And she was like, “Well, you should have thought of that before you left the house. Come back in an hour.”
Larry: Why wasn’t I home?
Jenna: That’s when you were working swing shift and you slept during the day.
Tony: You always treated us like adults. You would reason with us. But Marjorie would get angry if anyone else was good to us. She would never buy us anything, but she’d get mad if anyone else did.
Jenna: I remember I saw this little doggie key chain that had a shih tzu on it and Marjorie wouldn’t buy it for me. So I stole it. I tucked it away in my nightstand, and then Dad found it. And he knew I wanted it because I had asked him if he would buy it for me. He was so disappointed in me. I just cried and cried. I was so broken up about disappointing my dad that I fell asleep holding on to his picture. In my mind, it was the worst thing I could have done. Dad was a cop and I was a criminal. I was one of the guys that Daddy chases. And I remember I woke up and dad grabbed me and was holding me and was rocking me and was like, “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Larry: It was okay. I didn’t even reprimand you that much.
Jenna: I always felt that I had to protect you from having any more pain because I knew how much it hurt you when mom died. So I tried to be the strong one, and when bad things happened I would just internalize everything.
Jenna: Marjorie was a former model. She was about five feet nine inches, had long dark blond hair, and looked just like Marlene Dietrich. She even had a picture of Marlene Dietrich hanging over the couch. It was weird. She was very thin up top, and I thought she had really pretty boobs when I was little. But then she had a big fat ass and tree trunks for legs. And she would always walk around naked.
Tony: The thing that used to freak me out was when she would lay out in the backyard buck-naked. All my friends would look over the wall and see her sunbathing nude. Then I would go to school and it was like, “Ha ha, your mom is the naked chick.”
Jenna: She would lay out nude with all her friends, and wouldn’t allow us to play in the yard. You don’t walk around naked like that in front of a teenage boy. And she had a big ole beastly ass. Jesus Christ, woman.
Larry: No kidding. You would have wanted to keep that son of a bitch covered up.
Tony: Remember that guy who tried to burglarize our place? Me and Jenna were at home. I think he knew we were latchkey kids. We thought someone had come onto our little porch area. Then we heard the doorknob wiggle.
Jenna: And Dad and Marjorie didn’t believe us. They thought we were insane.
Tony: We knew the guy was going to come around the front when the door didn’t open, so we had a great idea to put dog kibble on the trail and the porch so we would hear him crunching to the door. And remember, we were watching TV in the living room and we hear crunch crunch crunch? And we were like, “Holy shit!” And we both ran into Da
d’s bedroom …
Jenna: … to get the gun.
Tony: I get the gun and I hear the screwdriver, trying to get into the door. I was ready to shoot as soon as he got in. But he couldn’t get through so he left. Then we called the police and they sent Dad over.
Jenna: You were flying. And you came over to the door and you were like, “Son of a bitch, you were right.”
Larry: I looked at the door and someone had tried to jimmy it open. I taught you to shoot if someone comes in and keep shooting until they stop moving.
Jenna: Tony started sleeping with guns under his pillows when he was about six years old. It was insane. Dad would never give him bullets but he gave him little Derringers and shit.
Tony: Yeah, but every time Dad dropped a bullet in the house, I picked it up and kept it in a box. So I was pretty well armed.
Jenna: I read the book Cujo when I was really young and it scared the living daylights out of me. I wouldn’t put my foot down on the floor because I thought something would get me from under the bed. So I would sit in my room and cry—more like howling—until Tony came and took me to sleep in his room. I would sneak into his bed from then on until I was about twelve.
Tony: You cried all the time. I was like, “Jenna, if you don’t stop crying, I’m going to sleep in the living room so I don’t have to hear you.”
Jenna: And I’d say, “Don’t leave. I can’t sleep. I’m scared.” And Tony would say, “Get up and do jumping jacks then, so you get tired.” But I was too scared to touch the ground. And I’d make him hold my hand. I was so afraid of everything. I think back and wonder, “How could Marjorie not hear me crying?”
Tony: Do you remember the final straw? We had moved back to Vegas and you were jumping on your four-poster bed and you broke it. I came in and you were worried that Marjorie would spank you. I was trying to fix it really quick, and I was in my underwear. And she came in and said, “What are you doing in your sister’s room in your underwear? Are you trying to molest your sister?” And I stood up and went bam. And she screamed and went running to Dad.
Tony: So Dad came in and said, “What the fuck is going on?” And I said, “I will not live with that fucking cunt.”
Jenna: What happened was that Tony and I had a powwow and decided that we either had to run away or tell Dad we can’t live with her anymore. And Dad said, “Okay, I’m going to divorce her. I’m going to tell her tonight.” That night we were all at the dining-room table. He told her, and all hell broke loose. It was like this huge bawling scene, with her screaming, “You can’t do this to me.” I started crying because it was so traumatic, and I remember looking at Tony and he was just stone-cold quiet. He didn’t show any emotion. He always told me if he could kill her, he would. I locked myself in the room, and cried and cried because it was another upheaval. She was storming around the house, knocking stuff over and saying things like, “I’m taking everything and you will have nothing but those little brats.” And I kept thinking, “Did I just fuck this up for my dad?”
Larry: God no.
Jenna: That was a major turning point for the way I felt about you, Dad, because I knew you were there for us.
Larry: You saw her a few years after the divorce, right?
Jenna: Remember, she came and picked me up? It was weird because she was saying that she loved me and I was her little girl. It really confused me. She took me to lunch, and tried to take me shopping but didn’t buy me anything.
Larry: I think it was a ploy to get back with me.
Tony: I think that she realized her treatment of us was the reason why you left her.
Larry: Well, there was another reason: I just didn’t like her.
Tony: There were so many cruel things done to you. Remember when I put you on a bike without training wheels …
Jenna: … and pushed me and then let go. It was a big bike too. You were crazy. One of the major things that ruined me for about a month was when we were in front of the apartment complex and you said, “If you touch that clover, you will grow wings.” Then you went off and played, and I just sat and looked at that clover for hours on end.
Finally I got up enough frigging balls and I touched the clover. I ran over to you going, “I touched the clover. I touched the clover.” And you grabbed my shoulder blades and said, “Oh my god, did you see these? What are you going to do? How are you going to get by in life with wings?”
I sat and cried for days and days, and finally my dad was like, “What is wrong with you?” And I sniffled, “Dad, I’m growing wings.” You got so busted over that.
Tony: Remember when we used to play ninja? We would climb walls and go into peoples’ houses and hide behind their couches while they watched TV
Jenna: And we’d be in full ninja gear. We dressed all in black. I mean, we were running around peoples’ backyards in frigging burglar suits, pretty much. What if someone had shot us?
The worst thing that happened was one time at Seventh and Franklin, I didn’t want to go out, but I didn’t want to be in my room alone. Tony was going no matter what, so I was like, “Fuck, okay, I’ll go.” And he told me I had to dress in all black, and he taped that fucking samurai sword on my back. Dad, this sword was twice my size.
Tony: It got caught on everything.
Jenna: We were walking on the walls behind peoples’ houses, and Tony was always faster than me because I was small. Tony jumped these trash cans and (starts laughing)…
Tony: Oh no, let me tell you what happened. We came down off the wall, because these people suddenly turned on their kitchen light. So we were in this back alley, and all of a sudden when we hit the floor we realized, “Wow, the ground is moving.” Then the clouds came past the moon and the moon shone bright, and we saw that the whole alley was cockroaches. It was a floor of cockroaches. So I just ran, full board …
Jenna: And I’m like, “Tony!”
Tony: I took off running like Joe DiMaggio, jumped the garbage cans at the end of the alley, and ran across the street.
Larry: You know, Joe DiMaggio was your grandfather’s second cousin.
Tony: I know. That’s crazy. Anyway, I’m brushing cockroaches off of me, and I turn around and see Jenna, just barely clearing the garbage can and, bam, she slams right into the pavement with her sword clanging and her throwing stars flying.
Jenna: And all you hear is uggghgghhhhh. I had to go to the emergency room for that.
Tony: Throwing stars were our favorite toys as kids. You could always tell where we’d been because there were two little holes everywhere.
Jenna: Remember when you were chasing me through the house and I was trying to hide …
Tony: … and you hid under the blanket. So I took the throwing star and was poking around, and I saw a little lump.
Larry: There was no one home. I was at work.
Tony: Yeah, we had the house to ourselves. So I saw a little lump and I threw it and, oh shit, out came Jenna …
Jenna: It stuck. I stood up and it was sticking out of my head.
Tony: It doesn’t stick very hard. Just the skin.
Jenna: I had to pull it out. I had a bruise this big from it. And then Dad came home and said, “What happened?” I lied. I said I was running from him and I was trying to get under the bed and I banged my head. I covered for you, and Dad fucking grounded me. I was so frigging pissed, but you made it up to me by buying me some Big League Chew.
Larry: I didn’t learn the truth for a long time.
Tony: So many bad things happened that I never told you about.
Jenna: I remember one time we were at the bike track, and you got in a fight with this boy. He had you in a headlock and you were choking to death because of the asthma. You had given me this butterfly knife to hold and I was like, “What do I do? Stab him?” But I didn’t have enough balls to stab him, so I ran over and jumped on the kid and started beating him with the blunt end of the knife into his spine, trying to get him off you. I was at the point where I would have killed to save
my brother.
Montana, 1989-
Tony: We really started to have fun when you began junior high.
Jenna: Yeah, but I was a nerd.
Tony: But you had good friends.
Jenna: I was in my awkward phase. All the girls my age were coming into their own, and I looked like a little boy. I had glasses and these old clothes and this funny pageboy haircut with bangs. Actually, it was a mullet. Then I finally convinced Dad to let me grow my hair out.
I always had this really strong sense of fashion when I was young, but we had no money for it. Before the first day of junior high, all I had in my closet were three pairs of pants and two pairs of socks and ratty old shoes. I was fucked. So I started grabbing my grandma’s clothes and cutting them up and trying to sew them.
Larry: It was that bad?
Jenna: I had no friends. I didn’t know anybody. I had no idea where to go. I was sweating because I was so scared. All these kids looked so much older than me. But later I started hanging out with Karen and Beth. We were like The Three Amigos. Then my hair started to get long and I decided to bleach it. I was still kind of an outcast, because I looked like a little kid. And Dad didn’t get me contacts until years later. But I felt a bit more centered.
Tony: And you were a cheerleader for a while.
Jenna: Well, we decided to go to cheerleading class. I had experience with dance and gymnastics, so I was super good and they weren’t. So they pretty much ganged up on me and decided they weren’t going to be my friends anymore. They wouldn’t talk to me, and would go out of their way to make me feel foolish. I went through about three months of being completely alone at school. I had to eat lunch by myself. A lot of the time I would skip lunch and leave school grounds to read a book. I lost a lot of weight during that time. Vivian would make me lunches in brown paper bags, and I would store them in my locker. After a couple months, the smell coming from my locker was so gnarly. They would give me notes during school saying that I had to clean my locker out. It stank like a dead body.
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale Page 15