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

by Jameson, Jenna

  We brought feature dancing to a new level: Where some girls were getting $250 a show, we were getting $5,000, simply because we had the balls to demand it. Add to that Polaroids, tips, and merchandise, and we were pulling in over $100,000 for a three-night engagement. We insisted on five-star hotels with room service, limos to and from the club, and at least two security guards accompanying us at all times.

  And we got away with it all until Toronto, where there’s a no-touching law for strippers. I was so shit-faced I forgot that in Canada, there are coins (as opposed to bills) in the amounts of one and two dollars. So whenever a guy threw one of those coins at us, I’d whip it back at him because I thought he was trying to insult us. During our second show, Nikki and I were grinding on the pole simulating sex with one another, when we were literally yanked off the stage by the police and put in handcuffs.

  In order to stay alive and out of trouble, we sent Mr. 187 home, where he went on to achieve modest local fame by beating a Pink Poodle patron to death. His spirit, however, hung over the rest of the tour. If we weren’t getting enough money from a show, we’d flip off the guys and walk offstage. At a Déjá Vu club one night, I swung around the pole and nailed Nikki in the eye with my heel. Even though her face was gushing blood, she kept dancing, probably because she didn’t feel a thing. My platforms ended up doing six stitches’ worth of damage. I don’t even know why anyone paid to see me: I was so thin from the crash dieting that my bones were sticking out everywhere.

  For us, living wild, free, and fucked-up wasn’t about sex, like it is for most people. It was about using our sexuality to get away with as much as we could. Our life became a never-ending bachelorette party. I found the party girl inside me that I had never explored. It was also one of the best times of my life, because since leaving Jack my entire existence had revolved around work.

  When we weren’t dancing, we’d go out on the town and wreak havoc at local clubs. After downing enough Sapphire, I’d dance on the bar while Nikki pulled my clothes off. Then I’d lay down on the bar half-naked, and Nikki would grab a candle and drip wax all over me. We never failed to attract a crowd.

  I remember looking around one night as the wax fell hot on my breast and thinking, “What the fuck have I become?” I was in a downward spiral, but I was enjoying it too much to stop. I had never been a drinker and, after downing a bottle of Grey Goose a day on that tour, I knew why: I’m not a good drunk. Alcohol brings out the anger that is, and always will be, inside me. I enjoyed abusing the little power I had won since my success at Wicked.

  Every so often, however, reality would intrude on my good time. I’d go backstage and see a huge bouquet of roses in my dressing room with a note from Jay. That bastard wouldn’t let me forget about him.

  And then, one afternoon as I was waking up, the phone call came from my dad. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew he wanted something. That’s all he called for any more. Ever since I’d started making money, I’d been taking care of him.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  I tried to ignore my massive hangover and focus on his words.

  “There are six—no, seven—bounty hunters outside,” he continued. “They have us surrounded.”

  I would have thought he was joking, but I’d never heard my dad joke before. Instantly, my hangover disappeared and my brain snapped into alertness for the first time in months. I wasn’t mad, upset, confused, or even curious. Just as my father did when I called him on the brink of death after Jack had left me, I went into instant fix-it mode. I needed to save my family.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In Miami, at your house,” he said.

  I heard Tony’s voice in the background. “Dad,” he screamed. “They’re coming through the door.”

  There were footsteps. My dad was running through the house. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “If you take another step, I’ll blow your fucking head off,” my dad said coolly. “I’m well-armed, and in range.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” I asked.

  “Jenna, I’ll explain later. I need a lawyer.”

  “Should I call the police?”

  I could hear more commotion in the background. Tony was yelling something about the windows. “A lawyer!” he repeated.

  I called Jay, who put me in touch with a lawyer he knew. I had never wanted to know about the trouble my father and brother had gotten into in Las Vegas so many years ago, but now suddenly I was in the middle of it all. With the lawyer’s help, I began to put the pieces together: Tony and my dad had been running a construction company for my uncle in Las Vegas, and were building multimillion-dollar homes for rich and powerful clients. However, one of their office managers was commingling funds, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of clients’ money and spending it as if it were his own. Evidently, one client found out and put a contract out on my dad and brother. (I know my father and brother couldn’t have been at fault, because they didn’t have any money or new, expensive purchases.) It didn’t matter to him whether they were directly involved or not; it was their company, and thus they were responsible. My dad paid the client back as much as he could, until he simply ran out of money. Next thing he knew, he was criss-crossing the country trying to escape from bounty hunters.

  Evidently, they had tracked him down, through Tony’s social security number, to my home in Florida. At the suggestion of the lawyer, I got on the phone with the bounty hunters. They demanded that either I paid the $25,000 my father still owed, or they’d bring him back to Vegas to serve time. I ran out to a branch of my bank, withdrew the money from my account, and wired it to one of the bounty hunters in Florida. I would have paid a million dollars if I had to: he was, despite everything, my father. And if anything happened to him, it would kill me.

  One of the bounty hunters ran to a bank to pick up the money, while the rest of his men stayed in position around the house. When he returned with the money in his hands, they all left.

  I never thought I’d see the day where I had to save my father’s life. After that, our relationship seemed to reverse itself. He started to reach out to me more, while I pulled away. I felt used by him. It seemed like he was only calling me now that I had the money to save him and put him up in a half-million-dollar house in Florida.

  Soon after, my father moved in with a rich woman in New Jersey, and basically became a kept man. When he told me he was driving a brand-new Harley and wearing a gold Rolex she had bought him—without even halfheartedly offering to pay me back the money I’d wired the bounty hunters—it only confirmed my disappointment in him. He seemed to have hit rock-bottom as a human being. So for several months, I simply stopped talking to him. Fortunately, I was on the road, where escape from all trouble was only a bottle and a pill away.

  The memory of the bounty hunters began to seem like a distant dream as Nikki and I continued to numb ourselves on tour. We became so close that sex seemed unnecessary. We got our fix onstage. If one of us either left a club with someone else or brought someone back to the hotel room, the other would be mad. I found that out the hard way.

  In New York, Roadie Boy spiked my drink with Ecstasy, which was a terrible experience. I don’t like the drug, and would never take it intentionally. When it hit me, we were at the China Club and Derek Jeter was hitting on Nikki and me. He bored me, so I went to talk to Joe Montana, who looked like he was a hundred years old. He could hardly move from all the beatings he had taken in his heyday. When he put his hand on my leg, I realized two things: the first is that I should never be in public on Ecstasy and the other was that I should have stayed with Derek Jeter.

  The next day the tabloids reported that Joe Montana and I were having an affair. But what actually happened was that I went back to the hotel to have sex with a woman instead (Paige Summers, a Penthouse Pet of the Year whose heart mysteriously stopped in the middle of the night following a routine surgery shortly afterward). Nikki ended up fooling around with a guy from the Minnesota Twins
. The next morning we had a platonic-lovers’quarrel and didn’t say a word to each other for days.

  After that, we made a deal: we could only bring someone back to the room to share in a three-way, which was highly unlikely considering that we never even slept with each other anymore. We had only tried to have a threesome once before, in Los Angeles years ago, and it was a disaster. A very forward girl at a bar threw herself at us, and started talking about sex and how much she loved women. She was beautiful, with raven hair and mammaries that could crack nuts, so we took her home and got right down to it. Nikki and I were very sexually aggressive with each other, and the other girl suddenly panicked, gathered her clothes, and ran out the door without even a kiss good-bye (or hello). We still have no idea how she got home, because we had given her a ride to Nikki’s place. Afterward, I realized that the mistake was ours: we believed her boasting, and ignored the cardinal rule of starting things slowly.

  After our pact, the only person I remember ever trying to take home was Damon Wayans. We were at the MAGIC clothing convention in Las Vegas, and decided to down a liter of Grey Goose and go to a hip-hop club. We were the only white people in the place, and we were so fucked up we didn’t care. And because we didn’t care, no one else seemed to mind either.

  Not long after we arrived, I spotted Damon Wayans sitting on a couch, looking hellafine. So we walked over to him, sat down on either side of him, and started blathering nonsensical drunk talk. When we started dancing for him, he was remarkably laid-back considering how out-of-control we were.

  “Damn,” he said to me. “Look at that body.”

  “But I don’t have a butt,” I protested.

  “You’ve got enough ass for me,” he said.

  We ended up jumping in his limo and going to his suite at the Bellagio. Nikki and I flopped down on his bed and started making out while he sat there coolly and watched. I’m rarely forward, but I had been mixing alcohol with the pills, so I was feeling frisky. I looked up at him and demanded, “Kiss me.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “That’s just not me.”

  “You know you want to,” I persisted.

  “You have no idea how much I want to.”

  “Then kiss me.”

  I crawled to the edge of the bed, and his face met mine halfway. All we did was kiss. Immediately afterward, Nikki and I got up, left the room, and stumbled out of the hotel. We checked into a run-down little fifties motel called the Tam O’Shanter, which was my idea because when I was a teenager, I used to go to parties there in room 22. We checked in and ordered pizza, but by the time the pizza guy arrived, we had both passed out on the well-stained carpet.

  As soon as we returned to our regularly scheduled tour together, I got dosed again. I was stupid enough to accept a glass of champagne from a guy, and there was something in it—either GHB or Rohypnol or Ketamine. Afterward, I was walking backstage and the hallway began to curve and stretch. When I got to the dressing room, I looked in the mirror and my pupils had tripled in size and were convulsing epileptically. I lay down under the makeup table and passed out. When Nikki woke me up for our next show, I was gone.

  “I can’t go out there,” I told her, my voice aquiver. “I can’t walk.”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. Just stay with me.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I can’t walk.”

  “Okay,” she said, bending over. “Wrap your arms around my neck.”

  She dragged me behind her, my useless legs trailing against the cement floor. When we neared the stage and the industrial version of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” by the Revolting Cocks started, Nikki was seized by adrenaline and took the stairs too fast. I lost my grip on her and tumbled down the steps. I hit the stage like a starfish, and just lay there. The music slowed to a crawl in my mind and the lights seemed to flicker on and off, though it was probably just my consciousness flickering on and off. Nikki grabbed me by the foot and dragged me behind her for the entirety of the song. No matter what happened, we never missed a show.

  Now, I always wonder if Roadie Boy was responsible for all the times I was dosed on the road. His behavior was getting stranger every day. He’d use my name to get everything he could for free—club entrance, drugs, tattoos, first-class plane tickets. And if my name wasn’t enough, he’d forge my autograph on an eight-by-ten to use as barter. He constantly wore the laminated passes he made for the tour around his neck along with Tool and Mötley Crüe all-access passes, even though he didn’t need them to get around the clubs. The only place they provided him access to was the legs of strippers. He’d tell these eighteen-year-old girls that he was the road manager for Mötley Crüe, promise to take them backstage to meet the band next time he was in town, and then end up in the bathroom of the club taking Polaroids while he had sex with them. He had a whole scrapbook full of his conquests.

  If bands wanted to meet me, they’d have to go through him first. So he’d take the opportunity to make a deal with them on the down-low. He’d promise them discounted T-shirts and merchandise, and then take off with their money. He would also have the guys in Tool leave messages for me on my phone. At first it seemed somewhat cool, but I slowly began to suspect that these guys leaving messages weren’t really who they claimed to be. In fact, I don’t think my roadie had ever worked for a band in his life.

  When someone is on the road with you, they are in your inner circle. They become as close to you as family. And, even though his mounting bar tabs, hotel-room phone bills (which were eight hundred dollars one night), and Ecstasy-popping should have been a sign, I didn’t see the truth until it was too late. I was willing to overlook a lot of his indiscretions, because he was working in exchange for nothing but his expenses. Besides, I didn’t want to think I had been betrayed by one of the few people I had let into my inner circle.

  The final blow came when he offered to get me a deal on custom-built road cases for two thousand dollars. My accountant sent him the money, and we never saw a thing in return. On top of that, he had promised my accountant seats at a Rolling Stones concert, and my poor accountant ended up stranded at will call with no tickets at all.

  So Nikki and I sat down one day before a gig and decided to count the number of Polaroids we posed for that night, since he collected the money. By closing time, we had taken 150 pictures at twenty dollars each. But when it came time to pay us, instead of three thousand dollars, he gave us fifteen hundred dollars. No wonder the guy didn’t want a salary: he was making much more under the table.

  When we had a week off from the tour, I called Roadie Boy and told him we didn’t need his services anymore. He went berserk. I gave him all the reasons why I didn’t want him working for me, and he had an excuse for each one and flat-out denied stealing from me. When that didn’t work, he threatened to ruin me. “Take a walk, motherfucker,” I finally told him. “You’re lucky I’m not having your ass beat.”

  For weeks afterward, he called Nikki, Joy King, and everyone I knew, making all kinds of threats. Then he talked to the porn gossip sites, telling them I was a bitch and a junkie and a painkiller addict. It didn’t matter whether he was wrong or right—or in this case half right—what mattered was that he was doing it out of spite, to hurt me. Months later, a certain band contacted me. He had used my name to meet and fleece them.

  “We are going to do something about this situation,” they said. “And we are going to do it our way. Do you care?”

  I gave them my blessing.

  With Pam Anderson.

  My mother was born on April 24. And every year on that day, I stay home and think about her. It was always strange to me that since her death, her side of the family had shunned my brother and me. They didn’t go to her funeral; they didn’t help my father pay her hospital bills; they didn’t even offer to babysit us while he worked. I was able to forgive them for this, but my brother and father never could. Maybe it was because I was so young that it didn’t affect me as much.

  Whenever I asked about my mother�
�s parents, my father and brother told me they were bad people and I shouldn’t talk to them. So eventually I put up a wall and pretended like they weren’t part of my life.

  But once again, on what would have been my mom’s fifty-sixth birthday, my thoughts turned to them. My father had called me just a few weeks prior. It was the first time I had spoken to him since I’d saved him from the bounty hunters. He phoned to tell me that his mother, who had nursed me to health with gobs of butter when I was withdrawing from meth, had died. After a long battle with cancer, the disease had spread to her lymph nodes and then throughout her body. She had been the closest thing I’d had to a mother, even if she did sometimes steal Tony’s coke. And to also lose her to cancer was devastating.

  My father was still playing boy toy in New Jersey. My brother had stayed in Florida with his wife and his son, Gage. Tony was going through a hard time. He had become a successful dry-waller, but his back started acting up and he was no longer able to work and support his family. So he decided to make a living as a tattoo artist, even though he’d never held a tattoo gun before in his life.

  With my brother and father so far away and wrapped up in their own problems, my thoughts turned to my mom’s relatives, especially her mother, who I remembered loving so much when I was a kid. I told Nikki all about it.

  “Just call your grandmother already,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I can. It’s been awhile, and I feel bad.”

  “You can’t be a coward about this,” she said. “You have to do it, or you’ll feel guilty your whole life.”

  My grandparents had always lived in the same little house in Las Vegas with the same telephone number. I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  “Hello,” came a man’s voice on the other end. It was my uncle, Dennis.