How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale Page 2

  Jack and I climbed onto the boat together. Waiting to greet us at the top of the gangplank was an older man with leathery skin and a high forehead with strands of greasy black hair running down his shoulders. His head looked like the kind of stained-wood souvenir you buy from a Native American gift store and put in your bedroom, but then remove because you’re too scared to sleep with it staring at you all night. His arms were strong but had seen better days, and the tattoos were faded and hanging in wrinkled flaps of skin, like a tie-dye shirt left in the sun too long. He smiled as we boarded, revealing a bottom row of teeth blackened from chewing tobacco.

  “Hello, Jenna,” he said in a thick German accent. He knew my name. “I’m Preacher.”

  I reached my hand out to shake his and he clasped it in both of his hands, squeezing a little too tightly. Typically, this would be a gesture of sincerity and fondness. But it felt malicious, like he was trying to trap and possess me. I pulled away and walked with Jack to the cabin below deck so that we could dump our stuff onto a bed.

  “I was raised by Preacher,” Jack explained, “since the day I was born.”

  Jack’s mother had gotten knocked up by a trucker and died during childbirth, so he had been sent to live with his uncle, Preacher, who was running with a right-wing German biker gang at the time.

  The boat pushed off, and Preacher steered it to a small sand beach on the other side of Lake Mead. I was enjoying the chance to relax with Jack and meet some of his friends outside the shop. We all swam, laid out in the sun, and drank beer. I was never entirely comfortable, because everyone was so much older than me, but I was at least more relaxed than I had ever been around Jack and his friends.

  As the sun set, the guys fired up a barbecue. I went back to the boat to use the bathroom. I climbed down the stairs to the head of the ship. Where the cabin came to a point in the head, there were two beds on either side and, in front of them, a small door leading to a bathroom and a sink. I never made it to the door.

  As I walked toward it, something grabbed my shoulders from behind, pulled me backward, and threw me to the ground. It was Preacher. He jumped on top of me, as fast as a raptor, and straddled my stomach. He lay down over me, pressing his chest against my face so that I couldn’t scream. It was all happening too quickly for me to comprehend what was going on.

  He shimmied downward along my body and, as soon as his chest slipped below my face, he slapped his hand over my mouth. People always say that if anyone tries to rob or rape you, you’re supposed to stay still and comply, so that you don’t get hurt. But I was my father’s daughter, and I fought him tooth and nail.

  He pulled his shorts down and stroked himself a few times, until he was hard. I wanted to kick that thing with all my strength, but his legs were pinning mine down. My arms, however, were free. When I tore at his hair, his mouth twisted into an expression of pure hate and he spit in my face. Then he grabbed both of my wrists with one hand and held them over my head. I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  “Shut up and stay still, you fucking whore,” he snarled.

  He pressed his waist against my hips, keeping them steady while, with his other hand, he pulled my bikini bottom out of the way and thrust inside me. If it hurt, I didn’t feel it. I just flailed away twice as hard, until my arms broke loose and I started hitting him in the face and scratching whatever piece of flesh my hands landed on.

  As we struggled, he kept slipping out and cursing. Every time he started to get it in, I would summon the strength to knock him off me until, finally, he just stood up and pulled up his shorts.

  I looked up, and the first thing I saw was his eyes. They weren’t beady, they weren’t glowing, they weren’t like anything I had seen before. They were like the eyes of a wolf that has just torn apart a dog and is still in attack mode.

  He pointed a finger straight down at me. “Don’t you say a fucking word or you’re dead,” he scowled. “Nobody believes a whore anyway.” He spat on the floor, then turned around and walked upstairs.

  It was only then that I began to comprehend what had happened. I sat up, wrapped my arms around my knees, put my head between my legs, and started crying. My whole body was shaking. It wasn’t just the trauma of the rape but the realization that I was all alone. I was stranded with a bunch of strangers. There was no one to save me, or just tell me I’d get home okay. Except maybe Jack.

  I walked into the bathroom to try to compose myself, so that I could brave the walk across the boat and to the beach to find him. But I couldn’t stop crying. I just stared at myself in the mirror and cried. As I washed myself—my hands, my legs, everywhere he had touched—I couldn’t stop trembling.

  I wiped the snot off my upper lip, splashed water on my face, and took in a lungful of air as I prepared to climb the stairs. The first person I saw at the top was Preacher. He was laughing, sitting on a bench outside the cabin joking around with a few of the tattoo artists, as if nothing had happened.

  Only Matt, who worked at the tattoo shop with Jack, looked up at me as I made my way to the back of the boat, clutching the metal railing. His eyes widened a little and his smile faded as he looked at me, as if he knew that I had just become Preacher’s latest victim.

  I jumped off the back of the boat to the beach and found Jack. I needed to pull myself together. I wanted my father, I wanted to go home, I wanted somebody to help me or fucking do something. I was out in the middle of nowhere and the only way home was on that motherfucker’s boat.

  As I told Jack what had happened between sobs, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t hug me; he didn’t even look me in the eyes. He just sat there—emotionless, useless. It was too much for me to handle. My body felt cold, like I had a fever, and all I wanted to do was go home, curl up in bed, and cry to my father. I was only sixteen. I still had braces and Barbie dolls.

  “I want to go home,” I cried.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “We’re going to take you home.”

  He walked with me to the boat, and talked to his uncle.

  “She says she needs to go home,” Jack told him.

  Preacher didn’t even blink. “We can’t,” he responded. “The boat is broken.”

  I ran off the boat and back onto the beach. I so desperately wanted to escape, but I knew that I couldn’t get very far. It was the middle of summer, about 105 degrees on the lake, and around me were just desert and mountains. So I had my choice: either run away and hope that someone would find me, or wait.

  I waited. A girl with long brown hair, a dancer I had seen hanging around the tattoo shop, walked past me. She stopped, turned around, looked at me—my puffy eyes, running nose, shaking body—and said, “He raped you, didn’t he?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You aren’t the first one and you’re not going to be the last,” she said.

  I still didn’t say anything. I wanted to ask whether he had done the same thing to her, but I couldn’t get the words out. She stood there for a moment, looking at me with a mixture of pity and disgust, then turned and walked away.

  When the sun sank, Jack came out and told me that the boat would be fixed in the morning, so I should come inside and sleep. I refused to shut my eyes anywhere near that monster. So I slept in a sleeping bag on the beach. Jack crawled in and held me as I shook and sobbed for hours. All night, he didn’t utter a word. All I could think was that Preacher had done this before, that Jack knew he had, that maybe Jack had even offered me up to him. I thought about it all night, until I just shut down. I realized that I couldn’t trust Jack or anyone.

  Conveniently, when we awoke the boat was running again. To this day, I have no idea if the boat was really broken or if Preacher just wanted to give me a night to calm down before sending me back into the real world. If I had gone home right away, I definitely would have told my dad and the police, because I was so shaken.

  When we returned to the harbor, I asked Jack to take me home. We rode in silence. Every now and then he reached over and petted me. I cou
ldn’t wait to get out of that car.

  As Jack drove up the hill to my house, I had him drop me off half a mile away, so that my dad wouldn’t know I was with him. It was 8 A.M., eight hours past my curfew. I walked the rest of the way uphill, trying to figure out what to say to my father. I was a wreck compared to the girl who had left the house the day before.

  I reached the front door, put my key in the lock, and turned the knob, hoping my father was away on patrol. But there he was, sitting on the living-room couch, just waiting in silence.

  I so badly wanted to please my dad all the time. I never liked to get into trouble. My brother was so much worse than I was, but I was always getting punished instead. I was the good girl, and I was constantly trying to prove it to my dad.

  “Where have you been?” he finally asked, very calm and cool. Having been a lieutenant in Vietnam and a police officer in Las Vegas, my father’s nerves had long since stopped responding to adrenaline. The more upsetting or dangerous a situation was, the cooler he became. He had never, in sixteen years, even yelled at me.

  I scanned my brain for excuses. “I lost track of time,” I said. “The boat broke down, and then we got lost on the way home.”

  “That’s it,” he said. His voice was actually starting to rise, the skin around the creases in his face reddened. “I am not going to put up with this from you anymore. This is bullshit.”

  I was taken aback by his reaction. I felt all the anger—and more than that, disappointment—that I had kept hidden from him for so many years well up inside me and explode. Since my mother had died of cancer when I was three, my older brother Tony and I had been left to raise ourselves while my father tried to deal with his grief. He never really got over it. Instead, he buried himself in his work and different women, leaving Tony and me to raise ourselves. Despite everything, I loved him so much that I’d stay awake until after midnight sometimes waiting for him to come home. I never felt safe until I heard the door slam and the rustle of his uniform as he removed it.

  As a teenager, I learned to enjoy his absence, because it spared me the growing pains that my friends were experiencing as they rebelled against their parents’ strictness. There were times when I longed for someone to talk about my problems with—or just to hug me when I was upset and help me feel grounded in this confusing world—but I knew that person wasn’t my dad. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t care about me; it was that he didn’t know how to show it. If I told him about boys who were pressuring me to have sex, he would sooner snap a guy’s neck than tell me about the birds and the bees. When I brought home a poem I had written about how lonely I was and how much I loved him—a thinly disguised plea for help—his eyes filled with tears, but he never talked with me about it or even attempted to deal with the problem. Eventually I stopped trying to reach out to him.

  So he had no right to get angry now just because I was late coming home, especially after what I had been through. I needed him, more than ever before, to be there for me, to understand. And what did he choose to say instead? “I’m done.” He had never even started. I realized that I was truly on my own, that no one understood, that there was nowhere to turn.

  “Fuck you, Dad!” I yelled. I’d never talked to him like this in my life. “What do you mean ‘anymore’? You’ve put up with it your whole life, you asshole. I’m a grown woman and I can do what I fucking want. Mom wouldn’t have treated me like this!” I couldn’t believe the things that were coming out of my mouth.

  My dad was stunned. He slumped back on the couch. “I am not going to deal with this,” he said. “I should put you in a foster home. I’m not going to have you in my house.”

  When he said that, all the emotion flooded out of my body and I went cold. I didn’t say another word. I couldn’t say another word. I walked upstairs and collapsed onto my bed. I slept all day and all night. I was physically, emotionally, mentally exhausted.

  When I woke up the next morning, I went to the kitchen and brought a handful of Glad garbage bags up to my room. I threw all my shoes, clothes, makeup, dolls, and schoolbooks into them. I was used to packing by now. Our family had moved at least a dozen times. But this would be the first time I was moving alone.

  Never had I been more sure about anything in my life: I was running away from home, never to return. And when I made a promise to myself, I kept it.

  So where did I run away to? There was only one place I could go to: Jack’s house.

  PART

  1

  I don’t mind heavy guys, skinny guys, short guys, tall guys, little boys, old men, trust-fund babies, chronically unemployed slackers, convenience-store clerks, rat-catchers, drug addicts, or rock stars (who fit into most of the above categories anyway). I like all kinds. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll let all kinds into my bed.

  Ultimately, the deciding factor is the lack of a “dealbreaker.” I can have a perfect dinner with the hottest guy, but if he opens his mouth and smells like dead fish, the date’s over. That is a dealbreaker. For most girls, dirt underneath a guy’s fingernails is a dealbreaker because nobody wants that filth left up their insides after a night of passion. There are many dealbreakers, and in one crucial moment any one of them can end a relationship before it’s even begun.

  Below are ten dealbreakers, all of which I have experienced. Consider this a not-to-do list:

  I.

  THOU SHALT NOT drive a Porsche and then take me back to your studio apartment in Valencia.

  II.

  THOU SHALT NOT speak any of the following lines:

  a. “I’ll just put the head in.”

  b. “So does this mean I’m not getting any?”

  c. “We don’t have to use a condom; I’ve never had a problem before.”

  d. “What do you mean you don’t want to cuddle?”

  e. “My friends will never believe this.”

  f. “I can put all those guys you’ve worked with to shame.”

  g. “I ran out of money. Where’s your purse?”

  h. “These sex toys are basically new.”

  i. “We have to be quiet. My mother’s sleeping.”

  j. “Your tits feel almost as good as my sister’s.”

  k. “I swear the camera is not on.”

  l. “Well, my ex-girlfriend used to do it.”

  m. “If it’s the police, tell them I’m not home.”

  n. “It’s not contagious anymore.”

  o. Any question from Book VI, Chapter 4.

  III.

  THOU SHALT NOT keep your dead pets preserved in Saran Wrap in the freezer.

  IV.

  THOU SHALT NOT ask me to quite smoking, drinking, taking pills, or watching reality TV shows.

  V.

  THOU SHALT NOT have any of the following items in your house:

  a. A face tanner

  b. A douche bag in the shower.

  c. Tubes of Preparation H in the medicine cabinet.

  d. Meals prepared by your mother in the refrigerator, each in a Tupperware container labeled for a different day of the week.

  e. Posters in the bedroom of Traci Lords, Ron Jeremy, Bill O’Reilly, or any other porn star who has written a book that can possibly compete with mine.

  f. Dirty laundry that has been folded and stacked in neat piles.

  g. Makeup from an ex-girlfriend of more than six months, especially if her last name was James,

  h. More fur coats than I have.

  VI.

  THOU SHALT NOT be able to take a bigger dildo than I can.

  VII.

  THOU SHALT NOT have a tan line in the shape of a thong.

  VIII.

  THOU SHALT NOT pass gas in front of me, pick your nose and flick the boogers, cry on the first date, or, most egregiously, put your hand down your pants, check your smell, and then lean over to kiss me with your face reeking of ass.

  IX.

  THOU SHALT NOT pretend like it slipped. (I refer here to back-door guys who try to put it in your butt every other str
oke.)

  X.

  THOU MAY leave the toilet seat up. But thou shalt not leave the toilet seat down and pee on it.

  Commandments that my husband, Jay, has broken:

  II, IV, V, VIII, and X.

  My mom, me, and Tony.

  My father never told me much about my mother. I think it was his way of trying to protect me from being traumatized by her loss. He figured the less I knew about her, the less I had to miss. But his silence had the opposite effect: the less I knew about her, the more I thought about her.

  My only memories of my mother were of her being sick, and of being kept away from her room because she had no hair. Apart from photos, I can’t remember what she looked like; but I remember what she sounded like. As I lay in my bed at night, I could hear her screaming in pain from her room.

  The night she died exists only in snippets in my head. The house was dark, and my father was outside. I remember seeing the ambulance lights, and sitting in the darkness in my brother’s room. He was very quiet. He knew what was going on. I didn’t, but I was crying for some reason. I knew something was wrong. After that night, I refused to sleep alone or in the dark. Every night, I crept into my brother’s room, flipped on the lights, and crawled into bed with him. After that, I just remember my father being sad—extremely sad. The parade of women he dated never seemed to fill the void in him, or in me.