Nikki had a cute apartment in Sherman Oaks near Mel’s diner. When we got there, she introduced me to her boyfriend, Buddy, who must have known her M.O. The three of us sat on her couch and watched television for an hour, until Buddy suddenly stood up and said, “Okay, goodnight girls!”

As soon as he left for bed, the atmosphere suddenly became tense. Nikki wanted me, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable yet.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” she asked.

“Okay, sure. Cool.”

She rifled through her videos, and put one in. It was a porno. A Savannah movie: Savannah Superstar. Her game was tight and clearly well-rehearsed.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Yeah, a little.”

She brought me a big soft blanket from the closet, threw it over me, climbed under it, and put her arm around me. It was just like being at a horny high-school jock’s house.

Her strategy was to get me so turned on that my desire outweighed my discomfort. First, she laid her hand against the side of my leg. Then, gradually, she started rubbing the side of my knee in slow, less-and-less-innocent circles. As agonizing minute after minute ticked by, she worked her way up to my outer thigh and then around to my inner thigh. She was careful not to touch my private parts, but she was also careful to bring her hand just near enough to make them tingle with anticipation. Soon, I stopped paying attention to the movie and started paying attention to how her hand was making me feel, and that’s when my libido began to overpower my brain.

Suddenly, all the tension erupted and we were all over each other. Nikki locked lips with me, and pushed me down. She straddled me and pulled off my top. Her hands and mouth were everywhere. She was much more aggressive than Jennifer had been —and much more experienced, if that was even possible, even though she was only two years older than me. All I could do was kiss her and scratch her back as she ravished every inch of my body.

We rolled off the couch and onto the floor. While she was going down on me, she reached under the couch and grabbed an immense flesh-colored dildo. She didn’t like vibrators, because she was extremely sensitive and considered batteries to be cheating. But she loved dildos —the bigger, the better.

After three hours of sweaty, psychotic sex, she handed me a huge black strap-on. Evidently, she wanted me to wear it. I had never even thought about using one, but after all the pleasure she’d just given me, I could hardly deny her some reciprocation. I will never forget the feeling of putting it on: when you have a huge thing like that between your legs, something just comes over you. You turn into an animal, a monster, a maniac —in short, a man. As it stuck out of me, she rubbed lubrication over it with both hands, and my nerves began to merge with this giant piece of plastic. I could feel every sensation.

She turned around and kneeled on all fours, expectant. This was weird. I stepped behind her, with one knee on the ground, and wrapped my body over hers. My intention was just to put it in slowly, so that I didn’t hurt her, but after the head went inside, something came over me. I thrust the rest of it in, and slammed her hard. I fucked her and fucked her and fucked her.

“Don’t move your body back and forth,” she advised me. “Rock your hips upward, like a guy. Mmm. Now move your pelvis down a little, so that it hits my G-spot.”

When I complied, she went crazy. Just looking at the veins on her neck popping out, her upper back mottled red, and her face transfixed in ecstasy made my body convulse with another orgasm.

After I pulled out, we collapsed and fell asleep on the floor together with the thing still hanging from my pelvis, brushing against her leg. In the morning, she dropped me off at my next photo shoot.

I didn’t want to impose on her, so I spent the rest of the week at the hotel. I saw Nikki one other time, and nothing physical happened. We just went to dinner, talked for hours, and planted the seed for a real friendship. She had gotten into nude modeling, she said, when she was looking for a way to pay the vet bills for her sick dog and happened across an ad for bikini models.

“Any time you’re in L.A.,” she said, “my place is your place.”

Then I flew back to Jack and the hellhole in which we lived. I put the $2,100 I’d made in L.A. into my treasure chest —I had stashed about $33,000 in a box under the bed— and went back to the Crazy Horse. Though it might not seem like a lot of money after so much time stripping, there are side effects of the job: it spoils your relationships with both men and money. You see too much of both, and you lose respect for both. That is why most strippers are bisexual and why I learned to live up to the “heartbreaker” tattooed on my ass.

As for the money, it makes it hard to ever work a normal job when, instead of a paycheck, you’re getting fistfuls of tax-free cash nightly. As a result, you tend to spend it almost as quickly as you get it —on clothes, nice dinners, hotel rooms, champagne, drugs, and other vices for yourself, your friends, your boyfriend, and your boyfriend’s friends.

But I felt like I had saved enough money for Jack and I to move to —and nicely furnish— a place where the hot water worked, the rats and roaches were exterminated, and the wallpaper wasn’t yellow and peeling. Over the next month, I looked at dozens of apartments that were listed in the newspaper, until I finally found a nice two-bedroom in a high-rise downtown. I agreed to move in and went home to my stash. I pulled out the box and dumped the bills onto the bed to count them. One dollar, two dollars, three dollars, four dollars, five dollars, six dollars, seven dollars, eight …

I suddenly blanched. They were all singles. What happened to the fistfuls of twenties and hundreds I’d been saving for so long? Only one person knew where I kept the money.