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

by Jameson, Jenna

  I holstered my gun, picked up the pipe, and chased him into Taco Bell. I clipped him, whack, right behind the ear. He flew and landed on a table where a family was eating with little kids.

  Jenna: That was a bad scene, especially Mike shooting up the 7-11 like that.

  Larry: What ever happened to Mike?

  Jenna: Oh, he’s dead. You were so fucking paranoid by that point in your drug addiction. A helicopter would go by and you’d be like, “They’re following us.”

  Tony: Yeah, we’d pull into a covered garage.

  Jenna: I’m like, “Tony, this is ridiculous.” And you’d say, “Do you see those guys? Those guys are watching us.”

  Selena: I was there. I remember that.

  Jenna: But you were the voice of reason. I’d say, “Selena, you’ve got to do something because he’s going to go off the deep end.”

  Selena: Well, that shit makes you paranoid. A couple months after we got married, I said, “It’s either that or me. And he picked me.”

  Tony: Remember that guy who ended up biting his tongue off?

  Selena: Wasn’t he the guy you beat up because he wouldn’t say gargoyle? (All laugh)

  Tony: I was sitting in the truck and he walks by and I said, “Say gargoyle. Say gargoyle. Just fucking say gargoyle. I dare you to say gargoyle.” And ten minutes later he said the word gargoyle, and it was on.

  Selena: It was like a cartoon.

  Jenna: Oh god Tony, you were crazy.

  Tony: Yeah, those were some wild times. I had several bouts where I did so much dope I didn’t even recognize Jenna.

  Larry: Unbelievable.

  Tony: I’m pretty calm now. I love tattooing. I’m the biggest family man in the world. I like hanging out with my family and playing with my son. I don’t seek out the adrenaline rush anymore.

  Jenna: Oh, how things have changed.

  Larry: For the better, my dear. For the better.

  Jenna: I remember they called me Mozzarella. My hair was really long and bleached white from the pageants, and I would crimp it. So they gave me the nickname Mozzarella because it looked like string cheese and maybe also because of my last name, Massoli.

  Larry: Why did you stop doing the pageants?

  Jenna: I just wanted to move on. I was the one girl without a pageant mom, so everybody always talked behind my back. It was the same old shit: even though I succeeded, it made people hate me more. It was irritating. I just came, I saw, I conquered, and now I’m leaving. So I said, “Okay, now I’m going to concentrate on getting popular at school.”

  Larry: And how did that turn out?

  Jenna: That didn’t turn out until I was about fifteen. It took a few years of practice. Before my first day of high school, I made all these plans that I was going to do all this stuff. I failed miserably. I didn’t talk to anybody. The first day, I threw up in the trash can in the bathroom. I made a habit of doing that in high school because I was so scared all the time.

  Tony: That was when we moved back to Las Vegas and were living at Grandma’s because we were out of money. I was in a room with you, Dad had the bedroom, and Grandma slept in the dining room on a daybed.

  Jenna: I don’t think anyone would even remember I existed freshman year. I felt transparent. Eventually, I realized I could make friends with people easier with extracurricular activities than during school. Most of the girls on the cheerleading team were catty, but the captain became a real good friend. She was a junior and, at the very end of the year, she would come and talk to me after my classes. All my classmates saw that, and they were like, “Whoa!”

  Then, over the summer, it really got good. My boobs got huge, like a C cup. I had spent so many years being so far behind everybody else physically that once I did get them, I was like, “Ha-ha. Revenge time!” I would wear a tight T-shirt and no bra out all the time, because I wanted to throw it into everybody’s face. But, fuck, right when I was starting to get popular, we moved again.

  Larry: That’s when we moved to Montana. You were both getting kind of wild, and I wanted to get you both away from Vegas. I wanted to take you to a place where America was America. Tony and I were pretty happy on the ranch, but you hated it there.

  Jenna: You get these harebrained schemes. “Okay, we are going to buy a cattle ranch, and we are going to raise cattle.” Um, Dad, what part of “I’m a city girl” do you not understand?

  Jenna: So Dad dragged us up to frigging Fromberg, Montana, which is an hour outside of Billings. It had a population of about 450 people. I went from a school that had thousands of people to a sophomore class with nine people in it. It was pure hell.

  Tony: All the girls hated you. They’d beat you up after school.

  Jenna: They would gang up on me, like four of them, and they’d knock me down and kick me. Even the frigging teachers hated me. From the minute I walked into my first class, all the whispers started because, now that I had my boobs, I was the flaunter of every piece of flesh. I would wear tight shirts and tight pants. I had a cute body and I was going to show it off.

  Larry: You just blossomed all at one time, and these little farm boys were hanging on the fence. Beginning with that guy Victor, there were about forty people I wanted to stab in the throat.

  Jenna: Yeah, the way I dressed worked in Las Vegas; it didn’t work in Montana. But I was popular with the boys, and I wasn’t going to give that up for these jealous girls in school. So it just got more violent because their boyfriends would leave them for me. There was this one corner that I had to pass on my way to school, and the girls would wait for me there and chase me. They were corn-fed, so they were pretty tough. One girl would get me by the back, and one would punch me in the stomach. They didn’t really hurt me, but Jesus Christ I got the wind knocked out of me. Or they would rip out my hair. During school, they would draw on the back of my shirt with markers, put gum in my hair, stuff like that.

  Larry: You did have horseback riding.

  Jenna: Yeah, I spent most of my time alone. I would go out in my bikini and I would ride my horse. I was super tan. We had 256 acres, and I would just ride. I got to be less of a prima donna because I herded and castrated and vaccinated the cattle and everything. So it was good for me in that way, I guess.

  I just didn’t want to tell my dad that I was getting my ass whupped every day because it was embarrassing.

  Larry: I had no idea. One day they called me and said, “We are going to put your child in a foster home if you don’t get her to go to school.”

  Jenna: Oh, Dad. The worst thing happened in Montana. I never told you but I just can’t talk about it. It was so bad. And that’s why I stopped going to school. So when you told me that, I slipped a gear. I was like, “Okay, these people are threatening my life and trying to send me to a foster home? They want to play a game? Fine! We’ll play a game!” I wasn’t going to take this shit anymore. So I marched into school, and the girl who picked on me the most was leaning into her locker to get a book or something. I walked up full force and, boom, I slammed the locker door so hard and busted her head wide open. She was out cold when I walked away, and there was blood everywhere. I fucked her up. Then I went to my locker and grabbed all my things because I was never going back there. I remember walking out of school for the last time and having this huge rush of power. No one was going to take control of my life again.

  Larry: Then she came home and told me what she did and everything she’d been through. I told her to pack her stuff: We were leaving Montana.

  With Tony in 1990.

  Tony: If you really want to delve into this, there are a lot of things that happened.

  Larry: I’d like to know what happened in Montana.

  Jenna: I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to talk about it.

  Tony: Dad, we moved once a year. So, though that didn’t make us confident, we became adaptable and grew up fast.

  Jenna: We rarely had any friends, so it was usually just the two of us.

  Larry: I was a workaholic. I
was gone all the time.

  Jenna: You worked such long hours, and when you came home you were exhausted.

  Larry: I was a part-time father, and I don’t care what anyone says, you can’t crowd quality time.

  Jenna: But I wouldn’t say, “Oh, my life was horrible.”

  Tony: No, it was great.

  Larry: You both certainly had no fear of blood. All that you went through makes the everyday machinations of living very trivial.

  Jenna: And you always supported us.

  Larry: You have to look at your cup as being half full. It made us stronger and it certainly made us closer than the average family. Because we have an unspoken bond between all three of us: no matter if we are a thousand miles away from each other …

  Tony: … it’s always been us against the world …

  Jenna: That’s right.

  Larry: … and it always will be.

  And so it was that, four years after I had first run away from home, I found myself with my family again. My father and grandmother nursed me back to health not with pills or herbs or chicken soup, but with butter. Butter-soaked focaccia bread was their palliative of choice. They stuffed my face with pure fat trying to get my weight back to normal.

  The sum total of my gratitude was zero. My heart was still lying on the floor of the apartment Jack and I shared, where four days before I had been hours away from failing the game of life. All I did was vomit and cry myself to sleep over Jack. It was impossible to separate where the depression from meth withdrawal ended and the depression from Jack withdrawal began. My entire adult life, up until this moment, had revolved around him. I was down to seventy-five pounds, and for every two bites of soggy focaccia I digested, I spit one back up. I was so weak that my grandmother had to walk me to the bathroom whenever I went.

  When my senses began to return, I told my dad what had happened. Everything. His eyes were wet when I finished. Being on the run had given him time to think about the things he regretted. And one of those regrets, he said, was not being a good enough dad. When my mother had died, he had no idea what to do with the two kids who were suddenly his sole responsibility, so he let us run wild while he busied himself with his vigilantism.

  “I tried my best,” he said. “But the best I could do was not very good.”

  Now, seventeen years later, I had given him the chance again.

  I lay in bed for two more weeks. Slowly, my hair became less brittle and the color returned to my skin. I eventually regained enough strength to get up and walk to the kitchen by myself. My grandmother, who had loaned me her bed while she slept on the sofa, would feed me chicken fingers while my dad sat in the corner of the room in silence. I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t keep the food down.

  Tony and Selena were also living at the house. As the depression began to lift, it dawned on me: he was no longer a frigging monster. He was clean. My brother was back again. Leaving Las Vegas was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because he knew no one in Reading to buy drugs from. Soon, he started coming into my room and we’d play cards and laugh about how fucked up we’d each gotten. It was as if no time had passed since the days when we were so close.

  More than anything, I wanted to know what had happened to Tony and Dad, and why they had left home and run around the country like a couple of fugitives. But I didn’t ask. I had enough problems of my own at the moment and didn’t want to burden myself with theirs. I knew that my brother and father had been in league in something bad, but I also knew they wouldn’t be comfortable talking about it.

  Six weeks into my recovery, the phone rang. No one was home, so I answered it.

  “Hi, Jenna.”

  It was Jack. “What do you want?” I asked.

  “I’m back in the apartment, baby,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right without you here. When are you coming back?”

  “I’m not, Jack,” I said. “I just can’t.”

  “What are you talking about? Listen. Everything is going great. I’m making a lot of money at the tattoo shop, I’m going to get cleaned up, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’d really like to try this again.”

  “Listen, I’m a different person now. I can’t go back there. That’s not me anymore.”

  I really meant it. Going back to Jack would be like returning to the Crazy Horse: I couldn’t go backward. I had let myself become out of control and weak with him. I never wanted to be that person again.

  Jack begged, pleaded, and yelled. It felt good to know that not only was my physical strength returning, but so was my emotional strength, which I had lived without for so long.

  My father and grandmother would have been glad to nurse me forever. They were happy to have something to do. But I couldn’t sponge off them forever. I needed to kickstart my life. And there was another person who had offered to help me when I was down. It seemed like so long ago since I had last seen her: Nikki Tyler.

  The next day, my dad drove me to the airport. I had cried when I first saw him at the gate nearly two months ago, but this time I cried a very different type of tear.

  “Jenna,” he said as we hugged good-bye, “just don’t fall. Don’t fall.”

  As I sat in the window seat watching Reading recede to a crisscross of streets and shrubbery, I thought, “I’m never going to let that happen to me again.”

  L.A. beckoned.

  “Oh my God, baby girl! What happened?”

  Those were the first words out of Nikki’s mouth. I had gained fifteen pounds but, evidently, I still looked like a corpse. Dark sunken circles sagged around my eyes, and my pelvis jutted out of my sweatpants like the handles of a baby stroller.

  “We are going to get you back on track,” she said as we walked into her apartment. “You’ll be fine.”

  She showed me to my bedroom: the couch in the living room where we had first fooled around. Always motherly, she helped me get my body back and my head straight.

  After a month of binge eating, I was ready for magazine work again. But even now, when I look back at the pictures, I’m repulsed by how skinny I was.

  Whenever I changed into an outfit to go out, Nikki laughed at me. My suitcase was full of tank tops, rolled-up boxer shorts, zipper-covered jackets, spandex pants, and black Lycra dresses. I looked like a heavy-metal groupie who had been living on a tour bus for a month. It was time, Nikki said, to complete my transformation from hoochie mama to full-grown woman. She gave me magazines, took me shopping, and drove me to auditions for bathing-suit pictorials, which were hard to come by at first because I was so skinny.

  But I didn’t want Nikki just to be my mother. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. After Jack, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to open up to a man again and allow myself to be that vulnerable. After working at the Crazy Horse for so long, every man in my mind was a cheater, a liar, and a shitty human being. I was angry, and more than ready to become the heartbreaker tattooed on my ass. Add to this my experiences with Jennifer and Nikki, and I was pretty sure I was gay.

  The slight hitch in my plan was that Nikki had married Buddy. And, though we continued to fool around, my efforts to separate her from Buddy were useless. She insisted that she wasn’t gay. I insisted that she was in denial.

  I was broke, so Nikki put me in touch with a manager at the Riviera Hotel, who flew me into Vegas for a week and booked me in the spotlight revue of their Crazy Girls show. Suddenly, I found myself in Sin City again—the hellhole I thought I’d escaped. But even though I was there physically, my mentality was different. My body was clean, my head was clear, and I was independent. When I caught a whiff of meth in the dressing room one night, it served only to remind me of the sadness that had been my life just a few months before.

  On the last night of the show, Jack showed up unannounced. He looked terrible: his beautiful chestnut hair was completely shaven and he was so emaciated that his bones were practically ripping through his flesh.

  After the performance, he asked me out to lunch and I accepted. I
knew that I was over him like a butterfly is over a cocoon. He said everything he could to win me back. But when I looked into his eyes, I didn’t feel a thing.

  When I left him that afternoon, it was a turning point in my life: the insecure sixteen-year-old tagalong who first had a crush on him was dead. And he had killed her. I now had the confidence to rebuild my life by myself.

  As I eased myself back into the world of Suze Randall and photo shoots, my attitude began to transform. Before, I never had an opinion about what I would wear, who I was working with, or how they wanted me to pose. But, slowly, I realized that they needed me as much as I needed them. I could have some sort of control.

  So I started opening my mouth: “This lipstick doesn’t match this outfit”; “What do you mean there’s no lunch?”; “You’re shining a backlight through my head, and it’s making me look bald”; “I’m not eating cold cuts again.” Remarkably, I found that people listened—and obeyed, because they knew that the more comfortable I was, the better the pictures would be.

  I wasn’t a terror to work with—that would come later—but I was making my first tentative steps toward diva-dom, not necessarily a good thing.

  Off camera, I lacked any sort of stability. Getting away from Las Vegas was probably the biggest decision I’d made in my life since running away from home. Suddenly, I really was independent. Living on Nikki’s couch without a car, I felt the immensity of the world outside of Las Vegas. I was in a city in which no one knew or cared about me besides her. I knew my living arrangements were only temporary: one day, I would have to leave. And then I’d be truly alone. The problem with sobriety was having to deal with reality. I needed to make some real money. I couldn’t suck off people—Dad, Jack, Nikki—anymore. And there was no way I was going to end up like one of those old strippers dancing with worn-out heels and a worn-out smile.