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

  Since most of the men were into me because I looked so young and innocent, I decided to amplify that. As my grandmother always said, “What you can’t fix, you feature.” So one night I put my hair up in pony-tails, wore little pink shoes, and carried a plastic Barbie purse, which further contrasted me from the hardened girls. And that was when I landed my first regular, the president of a large Vegas hotel. Rather than blathering about his problems, he wanted to listen to me talk. He gave me $2,000 to chat with him for two or three songs. And not only was the money great, it also helped me tip out more to Vinnie and increase my rank at the club.

  Vinnie didn’t yell at girls or abuse them; in fact, he rarely said a word. He just looked at you, and you knew to behave. He ran the place through quiet, all-pervading fear. At the end of the night, when I paid him his commission, he never smiled or spoke—no matter how much I tried to provoke him. The only words I ever heard him say in my first six months at the club were, “How much did you do tonight?”

  But, as much as I feared him, I knew he was my friend, too. I could see it in his eyes. He liked my work ethic. To stand out from the other girls, I begged him to let me do a lotion show, but he said it would just mess up the stage. So, because I was such a conniving little sneak, I found other ways to differentiate myself. It was a topless club, so we had to wear bikini bottoms. But while shopping one day, I found a G-string that had just a thin strand of thread going up the back so that whenever I bent over, the boys had a full view. One night when I was in the middle of my dance, shimmying up a pole on one of the back booths, Vinnie grabbed my wrist and, eyes on fire, said, “Go change that G-string right now!” Unbeknownst to me, by law in Las Vegas the butt floss in the back of a G-string had to be at least an inch thick.

  However, the next night I found a legal way around it. I wore the smallest, whitest G-string I could and wet it before I went onstage, so that the guys still got a little hint of what was going on downstairs. Night after night, it never failed to pack pervert’s row next to the stage, with guys craning their necks to get a good look. Other nights I would dance in roller skates, which was pretty dorky, but the guys showed their appreciation in dollar bills.

  Just as I was beginning to grow up after a month and a half at the club, September rolled around and school began. I decided to stay at the club. I quit the cheerleading team and abandoned my few friends, determined to make it through senior year without anyone finding out what I was doing. I lived in constant fear of seeing one of my teachers walk through the door of the club. Instead, one night a group of varsity basketball players came in and, after eyeing me for a while, asked, “Aren’t you Jenna Massoli?”

  I was caught. “No,” I told them without even hesitating. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  That night, I went home early. I was so scared I’d been busted that I couldn’t work. I wanted to keep my two lives separate: to be a mouse during the day and a shark at night. Fortunately, I was so good at lying to men by then that the basketball players actually believed me.

  Life changed for me at the Crazy Horse the day Jack introduced me to my first friend there. One afternoon at the tattoo shop he said that his cousin had moved back to Las Vegas and would be dancing at the club. He wanted me to meet her.

  She came to his house that night, and I was mesmerized. It was like seeing myself in one of those department-store mirrors that make customers look ten times better than they actually are. She was tall, blond, thin, and big-breasted. She was three years older than me. And she was all about the money. We clicked instantly.

  Unlike when I first walked into the Crazy Horse, when she entered for the first time, she commanded attention and respect. She seemed so confident and sure of herself. Her life had been so difficult that she radiated strength and beauty by way of compensation. In my mind, she literally glowed. Her name was Vanessa, and she was Preacher’s daughter.

  On her first day, Vanessa sat me down and taught me how to move on the pole—she could grip it between her thighs and hang upside down by one leg—and what to say to the customers. “When a guy comes into a club, most girls come up to him and say, ‘Do you want a dance?’” she told me. “That’s the last thing you should do. Be personable. Make him like you. Talk to him. Ask about his job. Act like you are interested.”

  That was lesson one—the basics. Lesson two was to prearrange a deal with the waitress to put water in my shot and extra alcohol in the guy’s, and then order a round of drinks as soon as I sat with him.

  “Get him as drunk as possible,” she said, “and rack those songs up.”

  If a guy said he wasn’t sure if he wanted a dance, she taught me to stay and talk with him for four songs. Then, when he finally asked for a dance, I’d charge him for five songs: the four I sat there with him plus the one I actually danced. By then, he’d usually have bought me a few watered-down drinks, each of which I got a kickback for from the waitress.

  Vanessa was a strip-club marketing genius, a human deposits-only cash machine. I watched every move she made when dancing and listened to every word she said to the customers. I learned what a finely detailed art stripping actually is. Everything had to be just right: the way I styled my hair, the outfit I wore, the shoes I selected, how tan I was. (She pointed out that a lot of the girls made the big mistake of being too tan.) Strippers are creating a fantasy, she said, so everything in that fantasy has to be perfect. Even though guys don’t consciously notice things like shoes or nails, a chipping manicure or a beat-up pair of shoes could intrude on the illusion.

  Finally, I had a confidante, mentor, and partner in crime at the club. After two months of friendship, I had soaked it all up and was as good as she was. Together, we became the perfect team, the top moneymakers in the club. When we double-teamed guys, dancing for them at the same time, every balding head in the room turned and no other girls could get a guy to buy a dance from them.

  For us, these schemes weren’t only about the money; they were also for the adrenaline rush. It was a high to get the upper hand over a customer. They were dumb, they were drunk, and they deserved it. At least that’s what I thought at the time. Strippers can be vicious. The mentality is that if these guys are going to victimize us, we’re going to totally victimize them right back. It seemed like a fair exchange. And it was character building: I was finally learning to take control of people instead of being so passive in social situations.

  Christy Lake, Nikki Tyler, Jenteal, Christy Canyon, Jill Kelly, Victoria Paris, me, and Janine Lindemulder.

  That year, Vanessa and I became the number-one dancers at the Crazy Horse Too. We were Vinnie’s favorite girls, and we knew exactly why: We were working twelve-hour shifts. While the other girls took breaks and socialized, we hustled nonstop. We figured that the more friends we made there, the less money we’d make.

  While most girls were bringing home three hundred to five hundred dollars a night, a good take compared to clubs in most other cities, I made two thousand to four thousand dollars per night. Somehow, I managed to spend a large share of it on dresses, purses, and shoes.

  They say that money can’t buy happiness, but that is an oversimplification. It actually depends on how you earn your money. If you’re juggling high-stress investments or managing scores of employees or deluged with phone calls or hiding something from the authorities, life is no fun. But if you can walk into a room, lead on a bunch of guys, and then leave with thousands of dollars in cash in your pocket and no obligation to anyone—not even an obligation to show up to work the next day—life is good. If I wanted to I would splurge on six bottles of Cristal champagne for my friends without a second thought. I wasn’t concerned about the future. My main objective was making money, and I met that objective night after night.

  My only real competition was a blond girl with a huge boob job who worked just once a week. When we were both in the club at the same time, we were working so hard it was as if we both had lightning behind us. We never exchanged a single word, but
there was an unspoken sense of rivalry—even hatred. If she made more money than me one night, it pissed me off so much that I would go home and scheme until I figured out a way to beat her. My only sticking point was my boobs: the girls with the boob jobs were the only ones who could make more than me, especially because they weren’t as common then as they are today. Every time a guy told me I was too skinny, I interpreted it to mean that my boobs were too small.

  For every inadequacy I felt that I had, however, I compensated with something else. When Vanessa wasn’t around, I found that the most effective way of making money was by teasing men senseless. If customers bought just one dance, I did nothing for them. I didn’t even get close to them. I just tempted them until they wanted me to touch them or rub my breasts against their chest so badly that they were willing to pay for another dance. And with each dance, I moved a little closer and touched them a little more until, in some cases, I had them paying for twelve dances and so wound up that they’d have to go home and fuck their wives silly or beat themselves off to hell and back.

  For a stripper at the Crazy Horse, this was unheard of. They’d usually just grind the guys raw, but I never did that. And the guys liked me even more because I was unattainable. I’d just stay as far away as I could with my wet little G-string, nearing them only briefly to breathe in their ear or make deep eye contact, until they cried out, “Oh, for the love of God, this girl is killing me!” Some of the guys looked like they were about to explode. A few even did, and came in their pants without even being touched. I quickly realized that I didn’t have to charge five dollars a dance, like the other girls did. I could get away with charging whatever I wanted: twenty dollars, fifty dollars, one hundred dollars a song.

  Soon, I had so many regulars that all I had to do each night was cater to them. One guy would give me a thousand dollars to let him brush my hair. Another would rub my feet. So I’d just sit there, get pampered, and, boom, earn another thousand dollars. I didn’t have to dance, speak, flirt, or give these guys any part of me. One local politician liked to be dominated and, although I had such a submissive personality naturally, one night I took his beer into the bathroom, peed into it, and then made him drink it. He loved it. The next night, he tipped me with a pink slip: for a brand-new Corvette.

  One afternoon, a modeling agency came to the club to shoot the girls for playing cards. They were making different sets for every club in America. They put a curtain up against the back wall and shot Vanessa and me together. When the cards came out, we were identified as the Barbie Twins, and the nickname stuck. I used to look at my dad’s Playboy magazines when I was thirteen and dream of being one of those girls. The photos in the magazine made the girls look so beautiful and glamorous, like models of perfect femininity. The soft-focus shots of flawless faces framed by sun-streaked blond hair reminded me so much of the old modeling shots of my mom that my father kept in his dresser drawer. But the dream still seemed just as far off even though four years had passed since then and I had an actual body now. Vanessa and I talked about modeling for men’s magazines all the time, but we never thought of getting an agent. We had no idea how to go about it.

  Outside of the club, Vanessa was a very different person. She was quieter and more contemplative. She was so much smarter than anyone I had met before. She seemed to have everything going for her. I wasn’t used to having friends who were good to me, but she was loyal and cared about my well-being. It made it much easier for me to gain confidence at the club when I knew someone always had my back. If I ever had a bad night at work, she would bring me a cupcake with a little candle on it. Or she’d tape a note to my mirror telling me, “Put on that winning smile, baby, and go out there and get them.” She always put other people before herself.

  Once I clawed my way to the top of the club, Jack actually seemed proud of me for a moment and bragged to all his friends that I was the new top dog at the Crazy Horse Too. We celebrated one night with dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Venetian. Sitting next to him, without all his asshole biker friends around, I remembered how I’d felt the first time I saw him in the tattoo shop. Waiting for the food to come, we began making out. He placed my hand on his pants, and I felt him growing hard. I unzipped it, and began to play with it. And then, seized by some sort of mad-genius inspiration, I scooped a handful of whipped butter off a plate on the table. It softened quickly as I stroked him with it until, minutes later, we had made such a mess of his pants that we had to clean the butter and cum off with San Pellegrino water.

  So our relationship got its second wind, which lasted for about a week. The problem was that in the biker crowd he hung out with, women were treated as subservient beings. And after my education at the club, I began to resent not having the permission to be myself around Jack and his friends. The only person I could even talk to was Matt, who worked at the tattoo shop with Jack and had given me that oddly understanding smile on the boat.

  Eventually, I made the mistake of telling Jack that I was feeling uncomfortable and that he needed to stick up for me. I should have known that Jack would react by doing the exact opposite—treating me even worse around his friends and leaving me alone constantly while he went on motorcycle runs to California. Of course, his behavior just made me more obsessed with him, as I kept trying to find the sensitivity that I believed he had. I was like a religious zealot. There was no evidence: my belief was based on faith alone. No man at the club could get the better of me, but Jack still could.

  I hadn’t talked to my dad since I’d left home. All he had to do was call and ask me to come home, and I would have. He’d been the sum total of my world since I was a little girl. But I wasn’t surprised by his behavior: it was not in his character to reach out to me in any way or make an effort to talk about anything.

  Before I met Jack, I was never much of a partier. I just had a few drinks. Whenever I saw him snorting various white, yellow, and pink powders, I always told myself there was no way I was putting that stuff up my nose. It wasn’t that my father had raised me well. It just seemed gross and pointless—and it probably stung. Of course, that didn’t stop Jack from trying to force his drug of choice on me: crystal meth. The conversation usually went like this:

  Jack: Try a bump.

  Me: I don’t think so.

  Jack: It’s just like a cup of coffee.

  Me: It’s not my gig.

  Jack: Just a little bump?

  Me: I said no, Jack. Stop it.

  Jack: You’re missing out.

  And then one day, the conversation ended like this:

  Me: Okay, a little bump.

  Between my experience on Lake Mead and my encounters with the men at the strip club, I had become a little more nihilistic. Jack dumped some powder on a Metallica CD case and spread it with his driver’s license. The shape it formed was clearly a line, not a bump—unless a bump was just druggie talk for a line. He handed me a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill. I bent over the black CD case and tried to snort as little as I could. To accomplish this, I took a little sniff and then messed up the tail of the line with the end of the bill, so that it looked like I had snorted it all.

  Within moments, my nose was burning and my head was pounding. It hurt, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to sniff this nasty dust. Then I swallowed the saliva in my mouth and, slowly, the migraine transformed into euphoria. My blood surged and my heart pounded. It was as though my spirit was too excited to stay in my body and wanted to leap out and dance among the stars—or at least vacuum the whole house. For the first time since leaving home, I didn’t think about the pain of being away from my father; I didn’t think about Preacher; I didn’t think about whether Jack liked me or not. Nothing mattered.

  “Jack,” I said. “Can I have another little bump?”

  So I did one more bump-line. A full one. I felt invincible. A few hours later, a thought suddenly occurred. I shared it with Jack.

  “How am I supposed to go to sleep?”

  He just smiled
at me wickedly and said, “Enjoy it.”

  I crawled into bed and shut my eyes. They popped back open instantly. A day and a half later, I was still awake, shaking from exhaustion and hunger, and I couldn’t stop grinding my jaw. I was miserable. I pledged never to do it again.

  That pledge lasted about a week. And, as an added benefit, Jack’s house never looked so clean. I tried a couple sniffs before work one day because I thought it would help me hustle better, but instead I found myself layering on so much makeup and doing my hair for so long that I walked onto the stage looking like Liberace.

  Once I hit the stage, I grabbed the pole and didn’t let go. I just stood there dancing as my knuckles turned white and my teeth ground together so hard that sparks were practically flying out of my jaw. Note to self: work and drugs do not mix.

  Around this time, Vanessa started drinking more heavily, losing her temper, and bursting inexplicably into tears. Every now and then she’d say something strange, like she didn’t feel safe at home alone, and would beg me to spend the night at her house. Gradually, she began canceling plans and pulling away from me. Something bad was looming over her. And that something bad was Preacher.

  Vanessa lived about five miles away from her father. Sometimes when I was at Vanessa’s, Preacher would stop by drunk. I would stay upstairs, for fear of seeing him, but often I could hear them quarreling. One night, while I was downstairs doing a bump-line with Vanessa, Preacher barged into the house. When he saw me, he froze for a moment. His face contorted into a threatening scowl, then he turned and left.

  After that night, Vanessa stopped talking to me. She wouldn’t even return my calls. I couldn’t figure out what the matter was, so I stopped by her house unannounced. When she saw me, her face blanched.