What got me was when Jordan told me at dinner one night, “I love you for who you are. You could be stripped of everything —your fame, your money, your beauty— and I’d still love you, because I’m attracted to what’s inside.”

That was something I had never heard before, and I knew he meant it, if only because he was so inexperienced with women. A month later, he came home with a huge tattoo of my name stretching from one shoulder blade to the other. It covered half his back. As a show of faith in return, I had the words “Jordan’s Crazy Girl” tattooed on my ankle.

Jordan lived with his parents. They were great people, but their home was a sty. It was weird having sex in the room next to them. His mom was a subservient housewife; his father ran a corner grocery store. Jordan told them that I was a Hawaiian Tropics girl, which wasn’t a hard lie to maintain since they only spoke Spanish. Because they were the only people I knew in Florida, I got close to them fast. When they took me to their family functions, I stood out like a lightbulb. No one except Jordan’s immediate family accepted me.

I eventually grew so tired of commuting back and forth between the Fontainebleau and his parents’ place that I decided to build a house. I found a nice lot, pulled my finances together, and started construction.

It wasn’t that I was settling down. I was escaping. While I waited for the house to be built, I booked a three-week feature dancing tour.

When I started making movies for Wicked, Joy wanted me on dance tours right away. However, not only did I not want to go back to stripping, but I also knew that the longer I waited, the higher my rate would be. By now, I had become one of the most in-demand girls on the circuit, largely because I had reached top status in the porn world and never appeared in clubs. The money was ridiculous. I was paid three thousand dollars per show, and performed four shows per night. And each time onstage, I’d make an additional three hundred dollars to one thousand dollars in tips. Then I’d make thousands more selling merchandise and posing for Polaroids after each show. Many strippers get into porn solely because they want to up their rates. Plus, dancing is a lot easier than being on set, a great way to build up your fan base and mailing list, and a convenient escape from problems at home.

Every girl in the industry had told me that to give the clubs —and the guys— their money’s worth, a feature dancer has to put on a big, themed show with candle wax, lotion, and as many outfits and props as possible. So I rehearsed a huge extravaganza. I planned to walk onstage to the theme music from Terminator, wearing a custom-built metal outfit with a built-in headset and a massive prop gun. Then I had a little Alice in Wonderland costume with a baby bottle, and I had a showgirl outfit with feathers which reminded me of Vegas but didn’t work very well onstage because the headdress was still fifteen pounds. I could barely get through the door to the stage without feathers flying everywhere; it looked like someone had slaughtered a chicken onstage. You name the fetish, I had the gear —six trunks worth of it.

Jordan helped me lug the stuff to the airport and I flew to Columbus, Ohio. When I arrived, I discovered I’d been booked into a bikini bar. This meant I couldn’t get nude, so I wouldn’t make as much money. They hadn’t promoted the show well either. When I walked out in my Feminator outfit, I felt foolish. Maybe I’d overdone it: It wasn’t like the pageants. These guys didn’t care about seeing a show. They just wanted to see some skin. So much for my delusion of actually being respected in the world at large.

On my second night there, the club owner brought a friend of his in to dance. Her name was Teri Weigel and she was famous largely because she was the only Playboy Playmate ever to do adult movies. And that was fine and dandy, but here she was doing a guest show during my week.

She had been feature dancing for years and had thousands of dollars in lights, her own PA system, and a jungle-gym of stage props to pose and dance on. It was a great show, I’ll admit.

Afterward, while I was performing my rinky-dink Feminator number, she had the nerve to pose for Polaroids. I watched helplessly from the stage as my customers handed her fistfuls of bills. The whole point of waiting so long to tour was to sell out and rake in the cash.

I walked over to her afterward and the first words out of her mouth were, “Who in the hell are you?”

That’s when it got ugly.

“I’m the girl whose show this is,” I said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Making money,” she said. “Same as you. If you can’t compete…”

“Compete?” I blew what was left of my cool. “Whose name is that on the marquee? Mine. What could have possibly gone through your mind to make you do something like this? Put the shoe on the other foot: How would you feel if you were brand-new on the dance circuit and some legendary dancer chick came in and took your fucking money?”

She began to stammer something that sounded like an apology. I looked at her body and complexion; she seemed to have fallen on hard times. But I wasn’t going to pay for her mistakes.

“Pack your fucking shit,” I told her, “and get the fuck out of my club.”

And so Teri and her loser suitcase pimp left. Next I had it out with the club owner, and finally my agent.

“If this ever happens again,” I screamed at him over the phone, “I will personally come down there and cut your fucking throat.”

Looking back on it now, I still would have chewed them out, because I was right. This was solely about business. And what the club owner had done was straight-up bad business. I was on the road alone, with no one to stick up for me. And if I was going to stand up there all night bending over for alcoholics, no one was going to take my money.

I flashed back to the first time I stood up to Suze Randall and squeaked something about not wanting to put oil on my ding-ding. I was a different person now: fearless and terrifying. I wasn’t sure if that was necessarily a good thing.

I also learned to keep a close eye on my G-strings and bras, because every time I removed one, it disappeared from the stage. I still wonder what guys do with them, and how stinky and crusty they get when they remain unwashed in their rooms for so long.

The other thing I learned that week was that guys don’t give a shit about thousand-dollar light shows and Feminator outfits. The best way to make money is not with a Broadway-caliber show, but by being enticing and engaging onstage —by making them want to splooge in their pants. And so, by the time I arrived at my second engagement, Al’s Diamond Cabaret in Reading, Pennsylvania, I had shed all pretensions of performance art. I was back in stripper mode.

I had been told that Al’s was a high-yielding club. But even though it allowed fully nude dancing, I was disappointed when I saw it. It was a total dump (though it’s since been remodeled). Of more concern, it was poorly designed. I was supposed to dance in a pit surrounded by a runway for other dancers and, far on the outside, a railing. Since the guys were along the railing and I was stuck in the center, there was no way they could hand me —or even throw me— money. So I kissed my tips good-bye. On top of that, Al took a five-dollar cut from each Polaroid in exchange for providing the camera and film (even though I had my own).

In most of the other clubs I’d been to, thirty to a hundred girls worked on a peak night, but at Al’s there were only six other dancers. And there was no lap-dancing allowed; only stagework. Even stranger, all the guys hanging out had their own coolers. It was strictly a B.Y.O.B. situation. I was definitely in the boondocks, and I had bad associations with the boondocks.

My dressing room was a tiny cubicle covered with graffiti from the other girls who had been there. I spent half an hour just reading catfights that stretched on for years. When I sprinted onto the stage, the guys began screaming and whistling like they were at a Molly Hatchet concert. It was the first time I felt the frenzy of an audience.

I walked offstage with three crumpled dollar bills that had been tossed hard enough to reach the inner sanctum. But the consolation came when I went to do Polaroids: two hundred guys were waiting in line, at twenty dollars a shot.

There was a wall outside my dressing room, and I could just make out the stage over it. While waiting for my next show, I looked into the club and saw a gorgeous creature in the midst of a slow, sexy dance. When she licked her upper lip with her tongue, demurely but not lasciviously, I knew she was one of the special girls —she had sparkle. When she came off the stage, I approached her. “You are a really sexy girl,” I told her.

As I spoke those words, I remembered having said almost the same thing to Jennifer at the Crazy Horse. It wasn’t my pickup line or anything. I was simply being honest. (But if the compliment happened to have the side effect of picking a beautiful woman up, so be it.)

“Thanks,” she said, blushing. “I saw you watching me, so I tried extra hard. My name’s Melissa.”

After my show, she knocked on my dressing-room door.

“Jenna,” she began, “do you think maybe you can give me some pointers when it comes to makeup?”

She laughed nervously.

I looked at her. She was a big-boned girl with a round face and a jaw that reminded me of the state of Texas for some reason. She wasn’t fat, but there was something about her that was just perfectly round. Her legs were thick and muscular, with dancer’s calves and short, impeccably painted toes. But what attracted me most was her mouth; she had a full, beautiful top lip that dipped in the center and scraped against her tiny teeth whenever she spoke. There was something intensely seductive about it. When she spoke, she seemed trustworthy, like she had a good heart; but at the same time she was slightly nervous and guarded, as if she were hiding something vulnerable. She exuded an air of mystery that I liked. Yes, I liked her. And she had given me the perfect opportunity to seduce her.

“Why don’t you come over to my room tomorrow?” I suggested. “I’m staying at the Holiday Inn.”

The next afternoon before work, she knocked on my door. I sat with her for hours helping her out: I told her not to wear red lipstick, to go lighter on her eyes, and how to put her hair up better. She had just had a baby three weeks before and said she felt fat, but there was not an ounce of loose flesh on her.

I didn’t hit on her once. It would have scared her off. With most girls, you have to make them comfortable first and build a friendship without compromising the attraction. Because of this, when she told me that she lived an hour away from the club and I invited her to spend the night at the hotel after work, she had no qualms about accepting. She knew that I was interested in more than just licking those cute little teeth of hers.

That night at work, she sat inside the ring around the stage and studied every move I made. Wherever I went in the club, I could feel her watching me. It’s funny how if a man did that, it would be creepy; but with a woman, it was such a turn-on. Maybe it’s because worship is a submissive act, and men are supposed to be dominant.

When we returned to the hotel, I washed my makeup off and put my glasses on. I wanted her to feel comfortable, especially because women are often intimidated by other pretty girls. I wanted her to feel like I was a real chick, not just some stripper looking for sex.

We sat on the bed and talked for hours. I let her know I understood her problems and told her personal things about my life. I wasn’t gaming her, at least not consciously. I just knew that I would want someone to do the same thing for me.

She sat at the foot of the bed, soaking in everything I had to say. I was keenly aware of her every movement and change in intonation. Every now and then, she’d grab my hand to look at a ring or ask me to French braid her hair. I understood these to be hints that she was interested and wanted physical contact. Whenever I touched her, her breathing would quicken and a quiet moan would escape from her mouth.

The way the night was going to end now seemed inevitable. I didn’t make any passes at her. I’m generally not one to make the first move. So I eventually wore Melissa down, and she lunged across the bed and kissed me. It was a clumsy move, which made it all the more endearing. When I kissed her back, her whole body relaxed with relief, as if she had been worried I’d spurn her.

We lay side by side, kissing and touching each other for an hour. I moved slowly, focusing entirely on her. She seemed amazed by what was happening. Eventually she confessed: She’d never been with another woman before. After having sex with men for so long, she wasn’t used to making love without being rushed and pressured toward a climax. More than that, she was blown away by the feeling of being so close with someone who not only understood everything about her, but who had gone through it as well. There is no comparison between the experiences of a man and those of a woman.

“Oh my God,” she whispered in my ear as we lay there in the universe-for-two we had created. “I’ve been missing out on so much.”

I explored her body until dawn. She was like a mixture of Jennifer and Nikki, with the demure femininity of the former and the old soul of the latter. Over the course of the night, we fell in love. It wasn’t about lust because, first and foremost, in those twenty-four hours we had become friends —friends with benefits.

And so began a relationship that lasted for years. She went on to become Penthouse’s Pet of the Year. I definitely know how to pick them.