After the convention, I stayed in Vegas to dance at Crazy Girls. I hadn’t heard from Jay since he’d left for Arizona, which was very frustrating. In the meantime, Nikki had disappeared. She had gone to the Wicked party and never come home.

Between Jay, my newfound eating disorder, Nikki’s disappearance, and the Vicodin, I was thrashed. I had started out just taking half a pill, but tolerance levels for the painkiller rise as fast as addiction to it does. There were girls I knew who were taking nearly one hundred pills a day. Nikki and I called them .357 magnums, because they had a 357 printed on them and felt like a gunshot to the stomach.

On the last night of my engagement at Crazy Girls, I popped two Vicodin as I was changing into my costume. Just before I went onstage, one of the girls said that Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe was in the audience. He had flown in from Los Angeles just to meet me.

After the show, I took three more pills. On the elevator up to the after-party, my head began to spin. I felt like I was transparent, and could walk through doors and windows. Small chunks of time began to disappear from my memory soon after they occurred. I made a mental note to myself: Don’t take so many Vicodin again.

When I arrived at the suite, I saw Tommy sitting on the couch, grinning like a tattoo-covered monkey. I was so high that I just flopped down in his lap. He began to talk to me, but I had no idea what he was saying. I just watched his lips flap. He was kind of sexy, in a simian way, though I still preferred Nikki Sixx.

Suddenly a photographer appeared out of nowhere and asked to take a picture of us. “No, no, no,” I protested.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tommy translated.

The flashes made me dizzy. I stood up, walked to the bedroom, and collapsed onto the bed.

Moments later, Tommy came in and closed the door. Within ten minutes, we were having sex. I must have been really high, because his dick is so big and I didn’t feel a thing. If I were fully conscious, I would have been stuck to the ceiling.

In addition, I had just gotten a piercing for the hood of my clit and had lost the little blue bead that holds it in, so the piercing kept coming out. My memories are vague and fragmented, but I remember having difficulty keeping my mouth closed. And I remember passing out. When I came to, Tommy was still fucking me. He seemed so into it. I drifted in and out of consciousness as he continued to slam me.

I woke up and discovered, to my horror, Tommy curled around me. I hate cuddling. I lifted his arm off my side and rolled quietly off the bed. I had to get out of there, and the last thing I wanted to do was wake Tommy and have to make nice to him.

I ran back to my hotel room, stumbled through the door, and found Nikki there in bed —with Lyle Danger.

I didn’t know how to react. All kinds of chemicals and emotions were zipping around inside me. I was coming down off the pills, I had no idea what I’d just done the night before, that monster Lyle was naked in my bed, and my ding-ding was in incredible pain. I knelt down in front of Nikki, buried my head in the sheets, and started crying.

She walked me into the bathroom, and we inspected the damage. My pussy looked like someone had punched it a hundred times: the lips were swollen to the size and color of an unripe plum. I remembered having used a condom, so at least we were safe, but I was worried that maybe I’d caught some kind of infection. I couldn’t remember what he looked like naked, so it didn’t dawn on me at the time that some guy with a monster cock had just shredded me.

Two minutes later, the phone rang.

“Hey, where are you?”

I recognized Tommy’s eager puppy-dog voice. “I’m back in my room,” I told him.

“Come back,” he said. “I’m starving, bro. Let’s chow down.”

Bro? Chow down? “Um, I’ll call you back,” I said, and hung up.

I never called him back. I got on a plane that afternoon and returned to L.A. Nikki and Lyle sat next to me. I couldn’t believe she was with him again, after all we’d done to get away. To his credit, he claimed to have cleaned up, and so far seemed sober enough. They had even made an appointment to get counseling.

Back in L.A., Tommy started calling ten times a day. He pretty much stalked me. If I told him I was going to the airport, he’d offer to drive me there. If I was going to a club, he’d offer to put me on the guest list. If I was washing my hair, he’d offer to lather it for me. The lies I told him to get out of meeting kept getting longer and more convoluted until, finally, I broke down and agreed to see him again. Sober, I found him incredibly cool and sexy, a happy-go-lucky maniac who also happened to be irritatingly affectionate. So we started dating. I probably spoke the phrase “Tommy, get off me,” twenty times a day when we were together, even in my sleep.

When he went on the road with Mötley Crüe, I joined them at various tour stops. It’s strange how life comes full circle. Only a few years before I was sitting on my brother’s shoulder at the Girls, Girls, Girls concert in Vegas, hoping to be noticed and taken backstage. Now I was practically part of the entourage.

On the tour bus, I spent hours bonding with Nikki. He kept talking about how he never wanted to touch another woman besides his wife, Donna D’Errico, and I thought, “Wow. What an incredible turnaround.” I never said to him, “Remember me from the Easy Rider photo shoot?” I didn’t want him to think I was that naïve little thing, because I wasn’t that girl any more.

With Nikki.

Everything with Tommy was an adventure that he saw through the excited eyes of a little boy at a zoo. When we were in his hotel room on tour, a pelican would suddenly fly in the window and he’d start feeding it. At airport cafeterias, I’d turn around and he’d be fighting with some businessman over salad dressing.

After meeting Tommy on the road, I flew to Miami. I had unfinished business to settle there. First, there was Jordan. Though we both knew it was over, I needed to say it to his face. He took it like a man, and got extremely angry. I just walked out; I owed him nothing. It was simply a fling that had lasted too long, and it was mainly my fault, because I valued passion over pickups.

The other item of business was my father. I had pulled out of my uncle’s strip club and, depending on who you believe, he either sold it, the city closed it down, or, most likely, both. As a result, my father was jobless and homeless, so I let him, Tony, and Selena move into my place in Miami. After all, I had no intention of living there anymore.

As I was packing my stuff to bring back to L.A., the phone rang.

I grabbed the receiver. “Hi,” came an effeminate voice on the other end. “This is Michael Drake from Cosmopolitan magazine, and we are just dying to do a fabulous piece on you. I’m not saying it’s a cover story or anything, but we’re very excited here and want to have Annie Leibovitz photograph you.”

“Oh my God, are you serious?”

“You’ve heard of her? Super. I’m going to put my best writer on this. Here’s what I’m thinking for the photo shoot: We’ll have this big fiery hoop with flames, and we’ll have you jumping through it.”

“Okay.”

“And we’ll dress you up like a poodle, with a leash and a collar and a little pink bow in your hair.”

“Sounds exciting,” I said. “Weird but exciting.”

Suddenly, the voice changed, replaced by something much more masculine. “What’s up, Jenna? It’s me.”

“You dick! I’m going to kill you.”

It was Jay, calling three weeks later. My heart swelled with excitement, tempered only by a tiny shard of anger because he’d taken so long to get back in touch.