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

by Jameson, Jenna

  “Jesus Christ, what?!” I snapped into the receiver.

  “Listen,” he said. “There is not going to be a big fight this time.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m just going to drive over there and get you. And then I’m going to make you pay for this. I’m not going to allow any of this to happen anymore.”

  “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “It’s over, sweetheart. You’d better start running, little girl.”

  We were on the phone for hours. The conversation was so brutal that I cried myself to sleep. He was so hurt that his voice shook. And it wasn’t a crying kind of hurt, it was an angry hurt. I wasn’t sure if our relationship could survive this.

  The next day on the set, Joy was so sweet to me. She thought that if she could make the shoot a great experience, I’d stay at Wicked. She hadn’t accepted the fact that I was leaving, and that for the first time in years, I hadn’t confided in her. She had no idea what I was going through. Rod, in the meantime, was still at the top of his game as a director but at the bottom as a human being. He was already dating the newest Wicked girl, Stephanie Swift, and the only consolation I had on set was watching her tell him to shut up just like I used to.

  For Rod, like any director, making the perfect movie took precedence over everything else. And because my trauma with Jay was getting in the way of my performance, he did whatever he could to sabotage my relationship. “Give me a fucking break,” he kept saying. “You’re not going to last six months with that guy. This film is going to be around forever. So let’s just make the best movie possible.”

  Even things that appeared to be unintentional on set took on extra significance, whether Rod was putting me in a lesbian scene with Asia Carrera or accidentally using lacquer paint instead of makeup glitter on my face. I was so freaked out before my one and only boy-girl sex scene that I kept throwing up into the wastebasket in my trailer. I didn’t want to do it. I tried every possible excuse beforehand, even suggesting we use a stunt double, which I still think could have worked if anyone had cared to try.

  Afterward, every cell inside my body was screaming, “Run.” I didn’t want to go home. I knew that if I returned to Phoenix, I was in for a shit-storm. But I’d spent the past year running. I wasn’t going to allow myself to do that anymore. I wasn’t going to fall into the pack-my-bags-and-never-look-back trap that seemed to be my biological destiny. So I summoned every reservoir of courage I had, and got on the flight back to Phoenix. Jay had told me to find my own way home, so I took a cab.

  When I unlocked the door of our house, he was sitting on the couch in silence, just like my dad had been when I came home from the boat trip with Jack. I sat down in a chair across from him, and we just glared at each other in silence. With every second that passed, I could feel his anger building like a steam kettle about to boil.

  After an hour, he finally looked at me and said softly, but with days of repressed venom trembling in his voice, “How … could … you … be … such … a … whore?”

  Once that word comes out of a guy’s mouth, all rationality goes out the window for me. Within moments, we were in a huge screaming match, both damning each other to hell.

  When my volume failed to shut him up, I became violent. I started smashing things. I kicked, toppled, broke, and threw anything in the house I could reach without a ladder. I think that, subconsciously, I believed that if I lost my temper, I could distract him. If I became psycho or broke my hand hitting a wall, I could change his focus to trying to calm me down or take care of me, instead of berating me for having gone through with the movie.

  When he stormed out of the house, I picked up the phone and booked a three-week dancing tour. I had at least tried to face him and make it work. But now it was time to give in to the pack-my-bags instinct. I was probably in L.A. before he even returned home.

  On tour, I stayed in the most expensive hotels, rented Ferraris in every city, and racked up over $40,000 on my credit cards. But for the first time, making money didn’t cheer me up. I didn’t know what to do. The answer to my problems was so obvious that it eluded me. It was like trying to find a lost hat that was on my head the whole time, because the only thing that was going to make me happy and complete again was to be with Jay. He was constantly on my mind. I was so sad and broken without him. After the way he had so immaturely dealt with the movie situation, I wanted nothing to do with him logically. But love is not an intellectual decision. You can’t look for it or hold on to it or run away from it. It comes and goes according to its own wild inclination, completely out of our control. All we can do is recognize it when we feel it, and try to enjoy it while it lasts—be it for a day or a lifetime. I was trying to fight it because I had taught myself, like most people, to fear love, because it makes me vulnerable.

  One evening, I worked up the courage to pick up the phone and call him. “You know what, baby?” I began. “I’m tired of running. I want to come home.”

  And he said, “Yeah, it’s time to come home.”

  I blew off my last gig and booked a flight that night. When I saw him, I ran into his arms and he wrapped them around me. I felt safe. His anger had resolved itself into resignation, and then acceptance, and finally love. It was like everything that had taken place between us in the past six weeks had happened to two entirely different people.

  We went home and talked about everything. In my absence, he too had realized that he loved me enough to want to make the relationship work, and knowing how much I had also been hurt had helped, along with time, to heal his wounded pride. We discussed not just the movie, but also the game-playing, the running away, even the dirty dishes and his long hair, which had to go.

  I’d never sat down and had such a rational, productive conversation with a boyfriend before. By the end, we came to an understanding of what each other’s boundaries were. I went to bed that night not elated, but resigned to my fate. Because no matter how hard I’d tried in the months before, I just couldn’t fall out of love with the guy.

  In myths about everyone from Hercules to the Buddha, rewards do not come without a struggle. There are labors to be undertaken, tests to be passed, hardships to overcome. Happy endings are the product of tragic beginnings. Jay had withstood (albeit not entirely heroically) his test when I went away to film Dreamquest. It should not have come as a surprise to me, then, when one morning, in the midst of our newfound bliss, Jay spoke four little words that shattered my world.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Where?” I asked. “And for how long? A day? A month?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “But everything’s been so wonderful. We’ve been having so much fun.”

  “Jenna, I’ve lived a crazy life,” he said. “And in that crazy life, I’ve made some mistakes and some enemies. I’ve fallen in love with you, and I want this to last. And the only way to do that is to take care of these ghosts from my past, because otherwise they are going to haunt both of us.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “I told you,” he said. “I have to leave, and I can’t tell you where I’m going. All I can do is promise that I’ll be back.”

  “Is it about another woman?”

  “It’s about business.”

  “Why do you have to go?” I blubbered. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Because if I don’t take care of this now, it could come back later and really hurt us. I will never be happy with you or able to have a family if I have to worry every day about my past catching up with me. I don’t want to put you through any more pain.”

  “Then don’t go. Get out of it.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have to deal with it. And then everything will be okay. It’s just a pothole, it’s not the road.”

  I was flattened. The whole scenario reminded me too much of my father and his secrets, and everything I had gone through when he was on the run. I couldn’t take it—not from the man I loved, not after all we’d been t
hrough, not again. But I had no choice.

  Just like at Vanessa’s funeral, I refused to cry. I wanted to be strong for Jay. So I stuffed all the emotion down and let him go. I booked as many photo shoots as I could to keep myself busy so that I didn’t have to think about him. But, of course, I thought about him every day. I was living alone in our newly furnished house in an unfamiliar city. His ghost haunted everything. When I went to bed, his unflattened pillow lay next to mine. When I watched television, even the sports channels on the remote-control presets reminded me of him. I survived only because my mind never wavered from one simple conviction: he loved me. And I loved him.

  After a week, Jay’s brother stopped by the house with a note for me. He had removed it from its envelope, so I had no idea where it had been sent from. I opened it that night and cried simply from reading the first two words: “Dear Jenna.”

  Jay poured his heart out in the letter, in a way he never had before. “I think of you every moment,” he wrote. “I think about how beautiful you are when you’re sleeping, like a little angel. And I think of the blond peach fuzz along the curve of your back. I can’t wait to come home and kiss every inch of your little face.”

  There was page after page of tenderness and affection, tinged with the hurt of being apart. It gave me chills. I’d never heard those kinds of words come out of Jay’s mouth—and, to this day, I still haven’t. I couldn’t get out of bed for days afterward. I was lovesick. Soon after, another letter came, followed by another two days later. After three weeks, I had a stack of six unopened letters. I couldn’t bring myself to read them. I knew they would make me sick again and send me into a downward spiral. I suddenly realized the difference between genuine heartache and obsession, which was all I had really experienced with Jack. And the key difference was trust: I had never trusted Jack. I trusted Jay. For all our problems, he had always been there for me. And when he left, it had been with the intention of strengthening the relationship, not weakening it.

  After a month had passed, he came home as suddenly as he had left. When I saw him, my body literally shook with emotion. It wasn’t just because of the truism that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but because I knew I had done the right thing by waiting. It was so out of my character not to question the feelings and intentions of someone close to me, but, against my nurture, I had, for once, stood by my man. And Jay, in his absence, had changed too. He was still a charmingly irritating bastard, but he was much more sensitive and demonstrably in love. It was time, finally, to begin our life together.

  And so Jay and I became not just lovers again, but business partners. After leaving Wicked, I had no intention of selling myself to another master—I was well known enough to try to live out my new dream of running my own company. I knew Jay had above-average business sense, because he and his brother were both retired by the time they were in their thirties. In one of their get-rich-quick schemes, they bought every phone number that was close to 1-800-CALL-ATT. This way, if anyone misdialed the number, Jay’s company put the collect call through and kept the profit. The company was called Fat Fingers.

  It took us a year to start Club Jenna, rent an office, hire a staff, and chase down all the assholes who had registered my domain name. Much to my surprise, one of the assholes who had registered one of my most popular domain names was someone I knew: the uncle who had done me wrong on the strip-club deal in Anaheim.

  I expected that since I hadn’t made many movies recently, I’d have to start from scratch. But somehow I was still the most downloaded person online. And even though Jay and I didn’t know the first thing about the Internet, Club Jenna was hugely profitable in its first month. So what began as a business created just to prove a point soon became a female-run success story as I added the websites of other girls (twenty-five and counting at present) under the Club Jenna umbrella.

  When I stepped back and looked at my life, between my increasingly co-dependent relationship with Jay and the new company we were starting together, I was taken aback. It all seemed so far out of my character, because in order for everything I had put in motion to succeed, I needed to remain stable and in one place. And that scared me. It wasn’t long ago that I was getting wasted on the road every day with Nikki, avoiding anything that smelled of responsibility. These newfound duties seemed so sudden, and to protect me from my worst enemy—myself—I needed extra support. I still didn’t have any friends in Phoenix, so the first person I thought of was my father. I wanted him to be involved, in some way, in this new life I was building for myself.

  My father and I had hardly spoken in the eight or so months since the bounty hunters, and it didn’t seem right to just shut him out of my life. In childhood, you think that your parents are perfect; in adolescence, you realize that they’re not; and adulthood, I realized, means finally accepting them for what they are, flawed human beings just like ourselves. So I sucked up my pride and called him at his gilded cage in New Jersey.

  “We shouldn’t go this long without talking,” I told him.

  “I dreamed about you last night,” he replied. “And when I woke up, I knew you were going to call. I dream about you all the time.”

  There was not just love in his voice, but a hint of sadness. It was a strange emotion to hear coming from him. But the real surprise came moments later. “And I want to thank you for the help in Miami,” he continued. “I don’t know if I ever actually thanked you properly. I think it’s because I was embarrassed that I had to ask you for help. One of the most humiliating things for a father to do is to beg his own daughter for money.”

  “I miss you,” I said as I choked up. “And I realize that it’s partly my fault this time, because I haven’t been calling you back, so I apologize.”

  As we talked, the sadness didn’t leave his voice. He sounded defeated. I assumed he was just paying the soul tax of sponging off a wealthy woman who he didn’t love, but it went deeper than that.

  “I need to have surgery next week,” he said when I asked him about his mental state.

  He said that after he moved to New Jersey, he was constantly tired and thirsty, no matter how much he slept and drank. Soon after, his hands and feet would go numb. And then, one day, he woke up and everything was blurry. No matter how much he tried to focus, his vision wouldn’t clear.

  He finally relented and went to see a doctor. And that was when he discovered that he was diabetic. He ran a risk of going blind, they said, and he needed to have surgery in a few days.

  Languishing up there, a kept man with no health insurance of his own, he also, it turned out, had realized the need for family. We never seem to admit these things to ourselves until it’s almost too late, until all of our mistakes have already been made.

  So I started calling my dad more often, like a worried mother. We talked weekly at first, and then finally every day.

  Oddly, it didn’t feel strange or unnatural to suddenly be talking to my father on a daily basis. It just felt right.

  I had decided after leaving Wicked that I was through with adult movies. My plan was to just shoot dancing and masturbation clips for the website. But with Club Jenna becoming such a success and Jay beginning to direct more porn, we decided to start a production company. And this meant that I was going to have to get in front of the camera again.

  I told Jay I’d only do girl-girl scenes, but we quickly realized that the only way these films were going to be bestsellers was if I did boy-girl scenes as well. Since there was no way I was going to be with another man on camera again, there was only one option open to us: Jay was going to have to step up to the plate and do it himself. To my amazement, this was something he had actually thought about already and was willing to do—as long as he could wear a mask to disguise himself. I warned him that when 200,000 copies of a video of him having sex hit the stores, it could affect his life and his family anyway, but he was adamant about it.

  I had met Briana Banks on the set of an all-girl movie, and instantly saw star quality. In per
son, she was a goofy, loud-mouthed tomboy. But she had the ability to transform into a tall leggy goddess whenever the occasion called for it, on camera or off. I wanted to take her under my wing, like Nikki had done with me after our Suze shoot, so I decided to make her my co-star.

  Jay directed the movie, which we named Briana Loves Jenna, and not only was he nervous, but so was Briana. She was literally sick with fear about working with me. But once we started kissing, she transformed from nervous girl to sexual predator, which reminded me of myself when I did my first scenes with Randy West (though hopefully I sweated a little less than he did). Her kisses were so soft and sensual, and I’d never explored a better mouth—it felt warm, with a scent I vaguely recognized from my childhood.

  Above left: With Briana.

  Above right: With my assistant and friend, Linda Johnson.

  When it came time for Jay and me to do our sex scene, we gave the camera to the assistant director, Jim Enright, who happened to have directed my first movies for Wicked. It was late and Jim had helped himself to a few cocktails, so he was a little tipsy. I painted the promised black mask over Jay’s face, and we prepared for our scene. I’d never seen a guy primp so much in my life. He was an even bigger prima donna than me, and was petrified that I would take it personally if he couldn’t get hard.

  The entire process was weird and uncomfortable, partly because Jay was still directing, so he kept adjusting camera angles and lights right up until the word “action.” Unbelievably for a first-time performer, Jay had no problem getting wood. But the sex didn’t feel right because we weren’t used to making love in such a cold, sterile, loveless environment. And Jay was very aggressive, which was fine in the bedroom, but I had to hold him back so I could perform a little.

  Afterward, when Jay and I gathered around a monitor to watch the scene, we were horrified. Not only was the picture shaking from Jim’s tipsy camera hand, but Jim had forgotten to hit the record button for Jay’s cum shot. He missed it entirely.