When I returned to Vegas after the Sponge Cake shoot, it was one of the most depressing times of my life. I had hit a wall: my career, as far as I was concerned, was over. As soon as I don’t feel like I’m moving forward or don’t enjoy something anymore, I tend to just give it up. And so I left the business. I was done with movies, and there was no way I was going back to the Crazy Horse.

I had no idea what to do next. All I had, once again, were Jack and Jennifer. So I started hanging out at the tattoo shop, building needles for Jack and shooting the shit with Matt. And every now and then, when I needed the money, I booked a photo shoot. After Sponge Cake was released, Nappy Headon, the producer, called and asked me to do another movie. I was high at the time and low on money —the two criteria for most bad decisions in the world— so I told him I would. Two weeks later, the tickets to Los Angeles arrived. I never used them, and I never called to cancel. At that point, I was too far gone on meth.

Just after my twentieth birthday I decided it was finally time to do something that had been on my mind for the last three years. Now that it was too late to give me a competitive edge, because I was no longer stripping or doing movies, I was ready to get a boob job. All those customers and box covers lost to girls with bigger, faker breasts had built a deep insecurity.

More than that, I prided myself on being able to change my appearance. For a Hustler cover, I’d cut my hair short. For a movie, I’d feather it and wear heavy blue eyeshadow. But I had done so many photo sessions in the past year that I was literally being shot out of the business. I needed to do something to get more jobs, otherwise I’d lose the only source of income left to me. At least, that’s what I told myself. The real reason, in retrospect, was that I wanted more attention from Jack. I thought that if I looked sexier, he would want me more. How pathetic.

I was so skinny and unhealthy from the meth that I decided to clean up, and eat up, before getting the implants. So I quit the drugs for two weeks, gained some weight, and went with Jennifer to see the wizard who had bestowed her with beautiful C-cups, Dr. Canada.

Mine didn’t turn out as well.

I only wanted to go one cup size bigger, but Dr. Canada got a little carried away. He went under my muscles, which were strung incredibly tight from years of gymnastics, ballet, and pole work, and put in these huge boobs. With an implant that big underneath my muscle, it felt like fucking Barnum and Bailey’s Circus was sitting on my chest.

I cried when I looked in the mirror afterward: they seemed way too big for my frame. Afterward, Jennifer bought two cakes (one for each implant) and we threw a birthday party for my boobs at a local Italian restaurant. I’ll never forget it, because for years afterward I continued to celebrate my boob day every July 28.

I drank a little to kill the pain and, when I was good and buzzed, stood up and took Jennifer’s hand. She looked so beautiful, and I wanted nothing more than to press her Dr. Canada boobs against my Dr. Canada boobs —gently, of course.

I led her to the bathroom, like I had so many times before, and we had sex in one of the stalls, like we had so many times before. But the routine ended there.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

“What?” That was the last thing I expected. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m pregnant.”

My face fell. That asshole Lester had knocked her up.

“For how long?”

“Three months,” she said.

“I guess that means you’re keeping it.” It was such a selfish comment for me to make, but I was in shock. I was hurt she had known before we had sex that it would be the last time, and hadn’t told me until afterward.

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at the floor, as if she were ashamed of having done something wrong in my eyes. And she was right: she had. I was still in love with her. My baby was pregnant with someone else’s baby. And I didn’t even like that someone else —the guy was cut from the same cloth as Jack. When I feel betrayed, I cut that person out of my life to protect myself from getting hurt anymore. So I stopped seeing Jennifer after that, and I lost one of the only people in my life who truly seemed to have loved me.

A couple weeks later, I was mostly healed from the surgery. I still felt like someone had built two spacious mosques on my chest. But I wanted to show them off anyway. You can always spot a girl in a bar who has just gotten a new breast job, because she’s flashing them to everybody. It’s not like showing someone the breasts you were born with. These are fake; they’re not yours, which creates the illusion that you’re not revealing anything personal and private.

I put on a white tank top that I had taken a pair of scissors to, trimming the neckline to show as much cleavage as possible and the bottom so that these strange new globes poked out of them. Then I went out with Jack and his friends to shoot pool. Jack couldn’t keep his eyes, and hands, off them. When I leaned over to take a shot, and I saw half the bar trying to look down my shirt, I thought, “Oh, yeah. Dr. Canada in the house.” Suddenly, too big was just right.

It never occurred to me at the time that it wasn’t even that big of a boob job —or that good of one, either. Furthermore, I didn’t realize until years later how stupid I was for even getting them. Drugs tend to impair your judgment and, even if you clean up for a week or two, they’re still in your system. Fake breasts just weren’t me. I should have just been comfortable being myself and relying on the intelligence and ambition that had gotten me to the top as a stripper and model to begin with.

Perhaps I always associate that boob job with the bad decisions I made in life, because they came at the beginning of a downward spiral. When I was younger, I followed the rules, went to school, and got good grades. On weekends, I’d drop acid for two days straight, but I never thought of it as a bad thing. We’d write down our revelations and then the next day, we’d read these papers that were covered with insights like, “My ass is like a bagel in the moonlight.” It was all part of growing up and finding yourself. In my mind, the so-called bad drugs were meth, coke, and heroin. Unlike acid and mushrooms, these were addictive drugs, and I thought I was too strong and too smart ever to fall into that trap.

But slowly and surely, it happened. When I left the Crazy Horse, I thought I was going to be a star. But now, at twenty, my career was already over. Jennifer was pregnant and out of my life; my fugitive family was somewhere in northern California doing God knows what; and the only man in my life was a meth-fiend tattoo artist who resented my presence and cheated on me every chance he got.

The only activity I had that was separate from Jack was the photo shoots. But I began to feel like Suze was taking advantage of me. My pictures appeared in every sex ad and foreign nudie magazine imaginable. And since I’d signed away the rights, she was raking in all the money. Whenever I asked her for a few chromes for a promo shot or to make a modeling book, she’d refuse. I’d ask her instead to shoot an extra roll for me at our next session instead, and she’d say she couldn’t. She made her living off enthusiastic new girls like myself, and I understood that and was grateful to her for making me an international cover girl. But there was a bigger problem —she was stringing me along, telling me that each shoot we did just might be a centerfold in Penthouse. However, nothing we did ever appeared there, and that had been my dream from day one. And with every picture of mine that was published somewhere else, my chances of ever being a Penthouse Pet plummeted lower and lower.

So I added Suze to my mental shitlist of people I could not trust and decided to stop working with her. Though my reasons made sense logically, they were also convenient rationalizations for my drug habit. Traveling to Los Angeles meant flying high and risking getting caught with speed in the airport. So I started posing only for photographers in Las Vegas.

Every now and then, Nikki called to make sure I was okay. But I never answered the phone: I knew as soon as she heard me jabbering nervously at a hundred miles per hour, she’d realize that I was wasted.

While I only snorted meth, Jack was an even bigger mess. Between Vanessa’s death and his falling out with his uncle, he needed to numb himself because it was easier to self-destruct than to face the truth. Soon, he was living in a permanent cloud of meth.

Usually, he just ripped a strip of foil off a cigarette pack, and inhaled the smoke through a sliced-up straw. But one night around 4 A.M., Jack and some of his friends came over and none of them had any cigarettes. So someone came up with the bright idea of unscrewing a lightbulb in the kitchen. They heated the base of the lightbulb until the glue on it melted, then they pulled off the metal base. After emptying the bulb, they drilled a hole in the top and stuffed a little meth inside. They heated the side of the bulb with a lighter and smoked out of the hole where the metal used to be. I just stood and watched the whole thing. It was a beautiful process, and the smoke smelled so sweet. When Jack offered me a hit, I decided to try it. It couldn’t hurt to do it just one time.

I inhaled a little, and the smoke filled my lungs. Unlike pot or even cigarettes, it was so smooth I could hardly feel it. When I exhaled, a thin three-foot-long column of smoke escaped from my lips. Everything seemed to move in slow motion, and then someone pressed fast forward. My heart felt like a woodpecker was inside, hammering hard enough to burst through my chest at any moment.

After that, I never wanted to snort meth again. Smoking it was amazing. At first, I only smoked it when Jack was around because he was the only one who knew the mechanics of the whole foil and straw contraption. But since I had no other challenges in my life at the moment, I set my mind to figuring out how to do it for myself. And once I did, smoking meth became a daily pastime. The high was more dreamy and intense, but it didn’t last as long. Every ten minutes I wanted another hit, so I constantly asked Jack for more.

When I was snorting meth, I felt invincible. I had no pain, worries, or even thoughts. But now that I was smoking it, I was a mess. I was blowing off photo shoots left and right, destroying what little remained of my reputation. My last vestiges of hard-won independence were fading away.

Of course, the more time I spent with Jack, the less he wanted me around. So the fights started again, more violent than ever because we were so wasted, moody, and illogical. At the time, I truly believed that in order for him to abuse me the way he did, he really had to love me. If he didn’t, he just wouldn’t respond or care, which would have been even more painful to bear. The problem was that he didn’t know how to love: his father had abandoned him, his mother and cousin were dead, the uncle who had raised him was a monster, the aunt who had raised him had run away, and he’d never been as attached to any other girl as he was to me. Despite everything, even knowing that he was cheating on me, I truly loved him. We had been through so much together.

One morning, I had a photo shoot booked at one of the better studios in Vegas. I had stayed up all night smoking meth, and hadn’t eaten anything substantial in probably a week. Jack and I were fighting again, of course. He didn’t want me driving to the shoot in my condition.

“What are you talking about?” I yelled back at him. “You’re more fucked up than I am, you know, you loser!”

But eventually I conceded defeat with gracious words like, “Well, I’d rather you go to fucking jail than me.”

Everyone at the photo shoot just gawked at me when I entered the studio. The photographer, his assistant, the makeup artist, and the stylist all asked the same thing, “Are you okay?”

And I blathered some five-hundred-word lie that could have been communicated in two words: “I’m fine.”

The shoot was grueling, not only because I kept going to the bathroom every ten minutes to smoke, but because I was having so much trouble with everything. The makeup artist spent an hour and a half on my face, covering up my sunken-in cheeks, my jaundice, and the sallow pockets of flesh everywhere. It must have been hell for her, because I couldn’t stop fidgeting. They kept offering me food, and I kept lying, “No thanks. I ate just before I got here.”

Throughout the photo shoot, they told me, “Jenna, relax. Let the tension out of your face.” I was clenching my teeth so hard from the crystal. Even more embarrassing, in certain poses my bones were sticking out so badly that they had to artfully drape my clothes over them so that I wouldn’t repulse readers. There were no magazines for guys with fetishes for anorexic meth freaks at the time.

When I went home, I collapsed on the bed. I knew I had been a total mess at the shoot. For the first time I can remember, I was truly ashamed of myself. So I decided to stop —not meth, of course, but photo shoots. I couldn’t be doing any more shoots fucked up.

I always had this idea that junkies were people who were so addicted that they got high alone. So I never wanted to get high by myself. Instead, I hung around Jack all the time. The problem was that whenever he got sufficiently high, he’d leave the house. So I’d be stuck there alone, calling the few people I knew, begging, “Come over, come over. I got a papier-mâché thingie I’m working on. Come help me finish it!”

The only person who ever came over was a Mexican girl named Lupe. We’d sit around for days and get mind-blowingly fucked up. No house I’ve ever lived in, before or since, has been so clean. I was like the old lady in There’s Something About Mary. I vacuumed so much that the carpets were actually disintegrating. The house looked perfect, but if it seemed too perfect, then I had to rearrange all the furniture to make the place seem more natural. I must have organized the frigging bathroom cupboards a thousand times, sorting each item according to size or function or owner or frequency of use —all in the same night.

Some girls who get high pick at their skin all night. I was not a picker. I was a maker. I was constantly amazed by the innovative and profound avant-garde artwork I could bring to life with a glue gun. My pieces should have been hanging somewhere, like a mental institution. Though I was infamous amongst Jack’s friends for making papier-mâché dragons in the closet all night, my greatest creations were my self-collages. I would go through adult magazines and cut my pictures from the phone-sex ads in the back. Then I’d glue them to a piece of paper and stick funny little phrases from Cosmopolitan below them, like, “Is it a do or a don’t?” “What procedures have you had done?” or “7 ways to make him beg for more.” Then I’d pick up my little handheld poker video game and play it all night, until my hands literally bled.

Another one of my obsessive habits was going through Jack’s things. He had a pile of pictures he had just put into his tattoo book and, as I was examining them, I saw a huge piece he’d drawn on a blond woman’s broad back. It wasn’t an actual tattoo, just a practice drawing of an immense, ferocious, beautiful dragon. In the background, through the tattoo shop window, I could tell it was nighttime when the photo had been taken. I was dying to know who this girl was. I flipped the page and saw her front side. I recognized her instantly: It was Lacey, the girl I had driven out of the house. That asshole was with her after-hours at the tattoo shop I had practically paid for.

I had a gun I’d bought while I was dancing. It was a little .25 with a pearl handle. When he came home that night, I pointed the gun straight at his head with one hand and threw the tattoo book at him with the other.

“What the fuck is this?” I screamed. “I can’t believe you’re still seeing that skanky bitch.”

I wanted to hear what he had to say for himself. And then I was going to shoot him. I didn’t care what the consequences were. He was my life.

He raised his hand and knocked the gun out of my fingers. It clattered on the black-and-white tile floor. I bent down to grab it, and he kicked me in the chin so hard that I flipped over backward.

We fought for hours that night, which was nothing new for us. It didn’t stop until he picked me up and threw me across our bedroom. I wrapped around our four-poster bed like the business end of a whip, hitting my coccyx bone so hard that I blacked out. The next morning, I drove myself to the emergency room, where they told me that the bone was chipped.

When I came home, I dragged my phone into the bathroom and shut the door. I needed to talk to someone. I decided to finally call Nikki back. When she picked up, I just started crying.

“What’s wrong, honey?” she kept asking. “What’s going on?”

“My life,” I said. “It’s not where I want it to be. This isn’t where I’m meant to be. I’m just… stuck. I’m… addicted.”

For the first time, I had vocalized it. I was addicted. Before, whenever it was time to fly to L.A. for work or when I got my breasts done, I could stop. But now it was out of my control. I hadn’t done any work in a month. I looked down at my hand, and my fingertips were black from all the time spent holding hot cigarette lighters under meth pipes.

Suddenly, the words all came tumbling out of me: “Jack’s cheating on me. He spends more time with his dealer than with me. And I think he’s fucking her too. He’s trying to kill me. I swear to God. I was in the fucking hospital today. He took this little sixteen-year-old-girl and ruined me. He’s the Antichrist.”

“Shhhh, shhhhh,” she tried to soothe me. “It’s okay.”

“It isn’t. I’m alone here. My family is bullshit. I don’t have any friends. I’ve lost Vanessa. And I can’t even look at Jennifer anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do. The only person I hang out with is a fucking Mexican crack whore who calls me mija.”

“You have me,” she said. “Remember, I’m always here. No matter what, I will take care of you.”

But there was no way I could ever go to Los Angeles to let her take care of me. For one thing, I didn’t know where to get meth there.

I hung up the phone and began to walk out of the bathroom. But something caught my eye. There was a scale in the corner of the room. I stepped on it. The dial spun and wobbled under the red needle until it stopped on a number. And that number was eighty. I weighed eighty pounds.