Dirty Rocker Boys (11 page)

What the fuck is “
”? I said. She shrugged.

Well, at least it had the same number of letters as “sperm.” I paid and waved good-bye to the old Japanese lady.

A few days later, Jani and I were on the bullet train, speeding at two hundred miles per hour across the Japanese countryside. I had brought the spermicide in my bag. We snuck into the tiny bathroom and he pulled up my dress and unbuckled his jeans. We had sex up against the bathroom door, traveling at close to the speed of sound. “This is crazy,” I giggled as he kissed me over and over.

I stayed with the band through the rest of the Japanese tour, through Australia, and then across the Pacific back to Los Angeles. A few weeks after we got home, Jani and I were at the grocery store and he leaned across my chest to grab some tomatoes. I squealed.

“Ouch, my boob! It really hurts! What if I have boob cancer?”

“Bobbie, you don’t have boob cancer.”

I hadn’t gone back on my pills yet, and we were still using the spermicide I had bought in Tokyo. Even so, something didn’t feel quite right. I was bummed out. I was sleeping constantly. I felt gaggy around seafood. Keiko, a Japanese-American model friend of mine, came over one day. I showed her the tube of
Japanese spermicide. Maybe that was what was making me feel sick? Maybe they made it with whale blubber?

“Bobbie, ‘
’ is Japanese for ‘lotion,’ ” said Keiko, looking at the tube. “You know, lube?”

I took a pregnancy test and BOOM. Positive. I couldn’t believe it—the doctors in Baton Rouge had told me I would probably never be able to have children after the surgery to get rid of the cancer in my cervix just a few years earlier. I called my mom immediately. “I know Jani and I have only been together a few months but . . . we’re having a baby!”

My mom, ever intuitive, could sense the giddiness in my voice. Things had moved faster with Jani than anyone had expected. She said something that surprised me. “You know, Bobbie, you don’t have to get married if you don’t want to. You can have the baby, and there are plenty of people in your life who love you and will help you.” I mulled over her words. “No, Mom, my baby needs a father.”

“I support you in whatever decision you make,” she said.

Not for a second did I consider not going through with the pregnancy. And Jani was thrilled, even though we had only been together four months. “Now you
have
to marry me, right?” he said, kissing me. He formally proposed over dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, Miceli’s in Hollywood, surrounded by singing Italian waiters. In our dessert was a ring. Without hesitation, I said yes. We planned to marry that coming July.

As soon as Jive, the record label, found out that I was
knocked up and about to get hitched, they withdrew their offer of a deal. (It took them a few years, but eventually they found the unpregnant Southern pop princess they had been looking for—her name was Britney Spears.) My modeling agency was equally irritated that I was pregnant so early in my career. They warned me that being married with a child is a real setback for a young model. I thought about all the hair metal videos and catalog shoots I would be missing out on and laughed. As far as I was concerned, this baby was a gift straight from heaven.

Once word spread that I was pregnant and marrying Jani, Matthew finally decide to get in touch.

“Bobbie?” A lump formed in my throat as I recognized the voice on the end of the line. Matthew sounded depressed. He had been talking to my mom in the aftermath of our breakup, and confessed to her how Gunnar and his management had been pressuring him to break up with me all along. Now he regretted not standing up to them. Matthew told me that he still loved me and that he had made a mistake. “Please don’t marry Jani. Go with love, don’t take this other path. It’s a mistake.”

“Matthew, I’m pregnant. Things are different now.”

“Perhaps there are ways we can get around that.”

“You’re crazy! You had your chance, Matthew. I’m not aborting my baby, if that’s what you mean. No way.”

In that moment I had, unequivocally, steered my life’s path away from anything involving Matthew Nelson. The future, I knew, lay with Jani Lane.

Jani and I were married on July 27, 1991, in a fairy-tale Hollywood wedding, an explosion of silk, balloons, tulle, and champagne on the rooftop of the Wyndham Bel Age hotel. As the afternoon faded into evening over the Sunset Strip, the air filled with the soft, intoxicating fragrance of hundreds of pale pink Sterling Silver roses, among the sweetest-smelling flowers in the world. We had a decadent three-tier wedding cake, and I wore a wedding gown I designed with famous Beverly Hills bridal stylist Renée Strauss, who also styled the weddings of Dennis Hopper, Raquel Welch, Gary Oldman, and even the famous wedding scene starring Stephanie Seymour in the video for the Guns N’ Roses song “November Rain.”

As my father walked me down the aisle, I realized that this day wasn’t about the cake or the dress or the gorgeous flowers or the centerpiece or my bridal veil. I felt our baby move in my belly, and something in me shifted—Bobbie Brown the freewheeling woman-child was faced with something she hadn’t experienced before. Adulthood. I smiled broadly at Jani as the ordained minister pronounced us man and wife. As we kissed in front of our guests, my heart pounded. I was only twenty-three, but this was some real, grown-up shit that was happening.

As the evening progressed, the night got wilder and more surreal. Duff McKagan wandered in late after a Guns N’ Roses gig and then got up onstage with Jani to sing a version of “Hey Joe.” Rick Allen, Def Leppard’s drummer, was there, as were all the guys from Warrant, of course. Bobby Brown, the R & B
singer, and my club buddy, came up to congratulate me. “So, where
did
you get the name Bobbie Brown?” he asked me, and I pointed at my father. “I was named after my dad.” He thought that was the coolest thing ever. “If I ever have a daughter, I am going to name her after me,” he said, and true to his word, on March 4, 1993, when Whitney Houston gave birth to their only child, he named her Bobbi Kristina Brown.

My father, unlike the rest of the wedding party, had driven all the way from Baton Rouge to the wedding. His whole life, he hated to fly. It wasn’t anything to do with not wanting to sit with my mom and Mr. Earl on an airplane. It had taken a few years, but thanks to Mr. Earl’s gracious and open nature, they had all become friends. My father would even go to Sunday dinner with my mom and Mr. Earl at their house. Mr. Earl had done so much to raise us and help our family, my mom had wondered if he should walk me down the aisle as well as my father. “You know, like walk you halfway down,” she suggested. My mom was always practical like that. I thought about it and decided against the idea. “No matter what happened in the past, I don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings, not on a day like this,” I said. “I support you in whatever you decide” was her response.

Because I was already three months pregnant, I was too tired to party with everyone else until late, so I went home and climbed in to bed, exhausted. I lay there, waiting for Jani, my husband. My mind was spinning. “Forever” had been a word I had tossed around before, but now I wondered what that even meant. I thought about my mother and father, about my mother
and Mr. Earl. They seemed like grown-ups, the kind of people who knew what “marriage” and “motherhood” were actually supposed to be about. When Jani came home after entertaining our guests all night, we didn’t have sex. Instead, we clung to each other in our sleep, dreaming of this new future and what it held for us both.

I was at our house in Sherman Oaks, pregnant, married, and chugging pickle juice. I became
obsessed
with pickle juice throughout my pregnancy—
no wonder Grandpa John called me Pickle,
I thought. Pickle juice, peach juice, caviar on toast, and guacamole. Guacamole every day. And the house was a mess. I was the opposite of a domestic goddess, the Antichrist of home economics—everything I tried to cook tasted like hell, and cleaning was something other people did. I had always been used to just being me, trying to have a career and living in the fast lane. It was hard adjusting to this new pace of life.

As I watched TV and munched on pickles, I paused on some channel that was airing Mötley’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” video. Somehow, even though the song had come out four years prior, in 1987, I hadn’t seen it. I was transfixed.
Dayum, those girls are hot,
I thought, dipping my pickle in a tub of guac. The video had been banned by MTV because of nudity, which I thought was almost as dumb as that Canadian channel banning “Cherry Pie.” Shot at the Seventh Veil strip club in L.A., it features a
bunch of strippers with incredibly firm tits and asses bouncing around onstage while Mötley Crüe sit around looking self-satisfied. Tommy looked super cute, as always. But honestly, the girls were cuter.

A couple of nights later, I heard that Vince Neil from Mötley was doing a solo performance at Spice, so I figured I’d haul my tired, pregnant ass over there and drink Shirley Temples, with pickles on the side. Jani was on the road, and I was just dying to get out of the house. I put on a flattering dress and was grateful that at nearly four months, I was still hardly showing. I had been at the club not twenty minutes when Vince approached me.

“I’ve been wanting to get to know you better, Bobbie,” he said, leaning in a little too close. His breath was overpowering. Was this asshole really hitting on me? “Yes, Jani and I were hoping you could have come to our wedding, with your
wife
,” I said. By now, his hands were on my ass. “So, where is your
wife
, exactly?” Vince looked nonplussed. “I dunno, Sharise is here somewhere,” he grunted, pissed off. I scanned the room and recognized Sharise Neil from the “Girls, Girls, Girls” video. She was a former mud wrestler who had a daughter with Vince, and from what I had heard, she was one sassy broad. “Ah, there she is!”

I wanted to punish Vince for being such a sleazeball, so I marched over to Sharise and introduced myself, with Vince trailing me, in a panic. Sharise was just as gorgeous in the flesh as she had been in the video. “Hey, Sharise, I’m Bobbie,” I said,
watching Vince squirm. “Vince had such nice things to say about you.”

“Oh, really? Well Vince is a cheating son of a bitch,” said Sharise. “I give this marriage three months. You hear me, Vince? Now fuck off and let me talk to Bobbie.” I was impressed.

I don’t care what anyone says about being pregnant—unless you’re a meadow-skipping earth mama in bare feet, it pretty much sucks. “You’re getting kinda fat, Bobbie,” Jani pointed out. Jani was not the most tactful husband during my pregnancy, to say the least. Possibly, deep down, he was just as freaked out about what was happening as I was. On top of that, he had always been squeamish, and my swollen belly, my cankles, my constant need to pee, the veins in my tits—the physical changes associated with pregnancy—were grossing him out. It didn’t help that I was hornier than ever—and the more I begged him for sex, the more turned off he became. The heady romance that had brought us together in the first place was becoming lost in a sea of maternity wear and pickle juice. My being pregnant, needy, and “fat” was a burden he was not mature enough to deal with.