As soon as Jack came home from the tattoo shop, I confronted him. “Where the fuck’s my money?” I yelled.

He couldn’t even be bothered to lie. “I borrowed some,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Fuck yeah, I mind,” I told him. “We need to move the fuck out of this shithole.”

“I know, baby,” he said. “And that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I thought I could make you some more money at the Golden Nugget.”

Jack loved to get high and gamble. I just never realized he’d been doing it with my money.

“Go to work,” he said, as he chopped up a couple lines on the kitchen counter. “You’ll earn it back in a week anyway.”

“You asshole,” I yelled, punching him in the back. He didn’t give a shit about me or my money.

I swore that I’d earn back that cash and leave his ass for good. Then I bent over the kitchen table and sniffed a giant line of meth, wiping away the suddenly distant memory of L.A. and Suze Randall and Nikki Tyler. It was the first line I had done in at least half a year. And it was the line that would ultimately send me over the edge. Doing drugs for fun and recreation is a lot less harmful than doing them for an emotional reason, such as trying to forget about the fact that your own boyfriend stole your life savings.

There was something about Vegas that was poison. Every day I spent there, I slowly lost my grip on reality. Even Jennifer, my only real friend there, was disappearing deeper into boyfriendland every day. It seemed as if the better and more exciting L.A. became, the worse I made Las Vegas for myself. I had such a drive to succeed, but somewhere even deeper there was a part of me that felt unworthy, as if I didn’t deserve it. And so I punished myself constantly —with insecurity, with drugs, and with Jack. Whenever I left town, I was sure Jack was cheating on me. So when I returned, I’d inspect the apartment for clues and sometimes even follow him when he left the house. That kind of behavior was beneath me. Even though I had found a much deeper emotional connection with Jennifer and then Nikki, I was completely co-dependent on Jack —in part because I felt him pulling away and it hurt me. I hated him for that. And I loved him for it, as well.

After one of our screaming matches, I was sobbing naked in the hallway, wiping away actual foam that had formed around my mouth from ranting and raving so much. And I was suddenly seized by the desire to call my dad. I missed Tony, and wanted to make sure he was still alive. Last I’d heard, after I’d talked with my father, he’d invited Tony and his girlfriend, Selena, to live with him so he could keep an eye on them. My dad had helped start some sort of real estate business with his brother, Jim, so to further rehabilitate Tony, he had brought him in as a partner. But Tony was still so heavily into drugs that he was constantly stealing things of my dad’s to sell.

When I called my dad’s house, no one answered. I thought nothing of it at the time, but I kept calling. And when no one answered the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, I began to worry. After five days without hearing from them, I asked Jack to drive me to my old house to look for them.

It was the first time I’d been home since running away. When we pulled up outside, the door was unlocked and hanging open. Something was definitely wrong. The television was on. A half-empty beer bottle sat on the coffee table. And the phone was ringing.

I picked it up. As soon as I answered, the line went dead. I began to cry uncontrollably. I had no idea where my family had gone or what had happened to them. Sure, it had never been much of a family, but it was better than not having a family at all, which seemed to be the case now. I called my grandmother, and there was no answer at her house either. All Jack could say was, “What the fuck is wrong with your dad?” The hypocrisy of the comment didn’t strike me at the time.

When two weeks passed without hearing from either Dad, Tony, Selena, or Grandma, I began to worry that perhaps Tony had gotten in trouble with some drug dealers, and they had kidnapped or killed my family in retaliation. I was a wreck.

It was then that my phone rang. I scrambled to get it. The voice on the other end was a woman’s: it was Suze Randall. She had sold most of the photos from our first sessions, and wanted me to model again. I flew to L.A. for a week, and slept on Nikki’s couch. It was one of the hardest weeks of my life, because away from Vegas I was powerless to do anything about my family. I pledged to contact the police when I returned home.

However, there was a message waiting for me when I got back to Vegas. “Your dad called,” Jack wrote in a note in the kitchen. “He can’t tell you where he is. Something happened and they all had to leave. He’ll call you soon.”

It was two weeks before I heard from my father again. He called from a pay phone in South Dakota. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but he assured me that he and Tony had done nothing wrong. They had packed Selena and my poor grandmother into a truck and gone on the run. For all my dad’s faults, he had always seemed to be in control of his life, but now he sounded like my brother —hunted and desperate.

After that my dad started calling every few weeks, always from a new city and with a new telephone number. After a while, I stopped bothering to write down his contact information, since it was constantly changing. I couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble he and Tony had gotten themselves into.

In the meantime, I began flying back and forth to L.A., crashing with Nikki. I began a cycle of going cold turkey on the meth for photo shoots —because my small chin and blue eyes don’t mask a clenched jaw and dilated pupils very well— and getting loaded when I returned to Vegas. Because I was able to stop getting high when duty called, I thought I had everything under control.

In L.A., Nikki took me to the corner newsstand every other afternoon so I could look for pictures of myself. And, slowly, they began to appear: on the cover of Hustler, and then Cherry, and then High Society. All three were on the stands with me on the cover at the same time. I was the slut of the month. Of course, none of them mentioned Jenna Jameson. They called me Shelly or Daisy or Missy. And, though the editors had never spoken a word to me, they featured interviews in which I discussed how inordinately horny I was, how much I liked sex with anonymous strangers, and how I fantasized about inviting my girlfriends over for threesomes with my boyfriend. (Not surprisingly, the original photos I shot with Julia Parton never appeared anywhere: they were so bad that she couldn’t even sell them.)

We were usually given a huge discount on the magazines for one simple reason: Nikki’s boyfriend Buddy worked at the newsstand. They had originally met when he caught her lurking around the newsstand suspiciously, trying to work up the courage to buy her first-ever layout in a men’s magazine.

Eventually I earned enough money from dancing and modeling to move. I rented a small, high-end two-bedroom apartment in a skyscraper in Las Vegas called the Crystal Towers. It was beautiful: the foyer had black-and-white checkered tile, the bedroom was immense, and the balcony overlooked an outdoor pool. I made sure to leave a forwarding number on the old phone, just in case my dad called. I was worried I was going to lose contact with him and Tony forever.

Being totally on my own wasn’t something I had ever experienced —or was even ready for. So Jack moved in with me, of course.

Relationships are funny, because they are not logical. Instead of judging them by the facts, we assess them by our expectations. I still thought that Jack was going to change. Things had been going well that week: with the money he was making at the tattoo shop, he chipped in for the rent and some furniture. And now that I was starting to get a little famous in Vegas because of my modeling, he was proud to take me out on his arm. Besides, I didn’t know any other guys I could sleep with, do drugs with, and throw dishes at. More than that, if we were going to continue to date, I wanted him close, so that I could keep my eye on him. I didn’t trust him at all. I was still too young to know that there is no such thing as love without trust. There is only obsession and co-dependence.

Even though I made much less money modeling than stripping, I never wanted to go to the Crazy Horse anymore. I felt like I had moved beyond it and onto a new challenge. Whenever I was there, I felt lonely, empty, and often angry —so, in that respect, it was not unlike a family to me. I didn’t have any friends there besides Jennifer, whom I still really loved, though she was spending more and more time with Lester. And talking to drunk guys on a nightly basis gets old fast. Every time a guy called me a whore or a bitch, it became harder to keep my mouth shut, especially when I was trying so hard to grow an adult-sized confidence. So when I told Vinnie that I was leaving, I had no regrets. I was definitely a child of the Crazy Horse —it gave me my first taste of independence and the tools I needed to survive in the real world— but I was ready for my next lesson.

Unfortunately, that lesson came a little sooner than I expected.