When Up and Cummers #11 came out, my life changed. Everyone in the incestuous little world of adult film was suddenly buzzing about this new nineteen-year-old all-natural sexual dynamo with the face of a little girl. There was only one drawback: Jack found out.
I came home from Jennifer’s apartment one night and he was sitting on the couch, just waiting, his veins practically popping out of his head. I sat down across from him, and he blew up.
“You are a fucking whore! Why would you ever do this?”
He picked up the videocassette and threw it at me. It hit the wall, leaving a black dent. He didn’t have a problem with the girl-girl stuff I had done in magazines, but being with another man on camera was worse than cheating in his mind.
“You’re an idiot!” he screamed. “How could I ever love a girl who would fucking do this to me?”
“Come on!” I yelled back. I was growing the confidence to stand up to him now. “How many girls have you fucked at the tattoo shop? How many? Be honest.”
“Jenna, give me a break. You are a fucking psycho. There was no one besides Lacey. Give it a rest, for chrissake.”
I knew that was a lie. I had inside information that there were others. And I didn’t feel a shred of remorse or guilt for doing the movies behind his back. I had beaten him at his own game. I had taken revenge in a way that the whole world could see.
We yelled at each other for an hour straight, destroying dishes, CDs, a bookcase, a coffee table, and my last surviving Barbie doll, in the process. Finally, he stormed out of the house, slamming the door so hard that chips of paint flew off.
He was gone for seven days. During that time my dad called. He and Tony had finally stopped running, he promised, and settled in a town called Reading in northern California with Grandma and Selena. He had met a lady up there and married her, and he wanted to give me his new number.
One afternoon a few days later, I came home from shopping and Jack had reappeared. He was cutting up lines on the kitchen counter.
“Here, you can have the biggest one,” he said.
He handed me a rolled-up dollar bill. I bent down and snorted it all. Suddenly everything was back to normal again. They say that time heals all wounds, but drugs get the job done quicker. Ever since I’d quit the strip club, I’d started spending more and more of my nights with a dollar bill up my nose. As a result, I began to lose the independence I was starting to achieve. I began to cling to him more, because now he was not only my boyfriend but also my dealer. For the first time in months, we started having sex again (perhaps because he wanted to regain his masculine pride after seeing the Randy West video). And every now and then, I’d wake up in the morning and fly to Los Angeles to do more of those movies that he didn’t want me appearing in anymore.
One of the most frustrating things about the film work was that the producers never wanted to put me on box covers. They all said my breasts were too small. My boobs were certainly big enough for all the men who stared at them every time I left the house. But they weren’t big by porn standards. Just like at the Crazy Horse, the girls with the monster silicone got all the attention and I had to compete with the one organ I had that was bigger, my brain.
But then I met a producer in L.A. who called himself Nappy Headon. He wanted me to star in a movie called Sponge Cake, and he promised to put me on the box cover. Before then, the only box cover I’d been on was Up and Cummers, but this was a feature.
However, I’d have to perform with a guy again. (For the box cover shoot, the photographers, Brad and Cynthia Willis, a husband-and-wife team, actually made me wear a push-up bra so that my breasts looked bigger.)
The movie was filmed in a house in Studio City. I didn’t know anybody there; the rooms didn’t look like they’d been cleaned for years; and, in comparison with Andrew Blake’s sets, the production seemed beyond low-budget.
The plot was very original: a naive young girl from the Midwest runs away from home to make it in Hollywood but somehow finds herself in the adult film industry and has to hide the truth from her boyfriend back home. I was the naive young girl, and something about the story had a ring of autobiography to it. While I was waiting for my first sex scene, my co-star, a gentleman I had never met before named Arnold Biltmore, sat next to me. He had a soft, pasty body; a porous, greasy complexion; and a kindergarten haircut, parted in the middle and combed to either side.
He flashed a big shit-eating grin and said, “So, are you ready to have a good time?”
I smiled back at him, wanly.
“You know,” he said. “You’re a cute girl. You’ve got potential. Congratulate yourself.”
He wrapped his sweaty arm around me. I was so obsessed with Jack that I never even thought about other guys; but even if I had been on the market, this guy still would have creeped me out.
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re like a lost little lamb with a cute pink belly.”
I gave him no encouragement.
“Here,” he said. “You look tense. Let me give you a back rub.”
He started kneading my shoulders. I stiffened my body.
“I’m thinking,” he continued, “of getting a tattoo of a sundial around my dick, so that whenever I get hard I can tell what time it is.”
Nothing about Arnold Biltmore turned me on. And in ten minutes, I was supposed to be having sex with him.
When our scene started, he tried to kiss me. I turned my head away from the camera, so that no one could see me grimace. All girls, be they sorority girls, porn stars, or Botoxed old ladies, like rock-hard dicks that look like they’re straining to wiggle free of the man they are attached to. But Arnold’s dick never felt like it got all the way hard. It was stiff but mushy, like a twig that’s been seaborne for several days. Prior to this movie, I’d had only good experiences. But as my head kept bumping into his stomach while I gave him head, all I could think was, “What the hell am I doing here? This is disgusting. This is not me.” This was truly the underbelly of the business.
“Now slowly roll your eyes upward and linger there,” the director yelled at me. He wanted one of those shots where I look up with soft, doe eyes as I’m giving head and make intimate eye contact with the camera —and, by extension, the person sitting at home watching. I slowly tilted my head back and rolled my eyes upward. And then I saw it. A bead of sweat on Arnold’s forehead seemed to be glistening more than all of the other dewy particles there. It swelled and grew until it turned into a bubble, and then slowly pried itself free of his forehead. It dropped slowly, growing from my perspective to the size of a beach ball.
When it smacked me between the eyes, it flipped a switch in my head. “I’m done,” I thought. “I can’t do this anymore.”
After the scene, I didn’t talk to anybody. I went to the dressing room to gather my clothes. Kylie Ireland was in there with her manager, an obsessive, overbearing guy who was willing to be her lapdog in exchange for the opportunity to suck as much money as he could from her. We call those types of people suitcase pimps. They date industry girls, become their managers, take all their money, and often leave them broke, jobless, prematurely aged wrecks. These fine specimens can often be seen trailing behind the girls in airports, carrying all their suitcases. Porn stars constantly go for this type of guy because they think he’s going to protect her, manage her, and do her drudge work for her. After a girl works in the industry for a while, that’s the only thing guys seem good for —taking care of stuff.
Kylie was having trouble with her sponge. When a girl is on her period, a company can’t afford to put a movie on hold and wait until she’s not bleeding. So some genius came up with the idea of inserting a sea sponge against the cervix. It catches all the blood, and the camera never sees a thing.
Kylie couldn’t seem to pull her sponge out, so her suitcase pimp decided to come to the rescue. He knelt in front of her and reached deep inside her. He had a very strange expression on his face, as if he actually enjoyed the responsibility. When he fished it out between his bloody fingers, he actually sniffed it. I had to get out of there. I never wanted to do another movie again.
