Dirty Rocker Boys (13 page)

Each night I would sit and rock her and sing soft lullabies until she fell asleep. By the time she was two, when she still was wasn’t able to wind down and go to sleep without having Momma rock her and sing to her for an hour every night, it became a challenge.
I wish you could just fall asleep,
I thought, sitting by her crib, feeling guilty the second I had the thought. I wished Jani could have been more help, but he really wasn’t around much in the first few years of Taylar’s life. As much as he loved her, it seemed like his head was often elsewhere. Even worse, he was starting to come home drunk almost every night.

I had always thought the drinking was part of the hair metal stage act. The Warrant boys often liked to drink before performances, and it just seemed like a thing that rock stars did. I didn’t start suspecting that he had a problem with alcohol until I stopped partying. Then I was able to observe his behavior more clearly. Jani would never drink at home, but he would go out and get belligerently drunk and come home with black eyes from getting in fights. And when he was drunk, he would get dark and angry. He wasn’t a fun, celebratory drunk. He would wake me up, accuse me of cheating, wake Taylar up and start her crying. “Fuck this shit, Jani, every time you drink, you’re a dick,” I told him, exasperated. “If you really think I’m cheating and not home all day changing diapers, then divorce me!”

I didn’t get his relationship with alcohol, because I had never liked to be out of control. I never wanted to be that girl in the club bathroom unconscious in her own puke, getting fucked by two dudes. So I didn’t really drink to excess. And I didn’t realize that when people flip their personalities while they’re drinking, like Jani did, it’s often a sign of some hidden damage. There’s usually something they are trying to emotionally escape from, something that is hurting them. When I was married to Jani, I didn’t know about any secret pain he might have been suffering. He never shared his troubles with me. Naïve as this sounds, I had no idea I was living with an alcoholic.

One day, when Taylar was around a year old, Jani was feeding her while I was in the yard. I heard a slap and then the sound of Taylar screaming louder than I had ever heard her scream. I ran into the kitchen.

“What the fuck is she crying for?”

“She won’t eat. So I popped her on the hand.”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Jani? How would you like it if I force-fed you and then hit you just because you were full? If you
ever
hit her again, I will kill you and bury you in a trailer park! You hear me?”

I was so psycho, it was scaring Jani, I could tell. But I never believed in physical discipline in any way, shape, or form. You don’t ever have to hit a child in anger in order to get your point across, or control them. All that does is make the child hate
you. I knew that from experience. Jani and I got into a huge row about it, and he smashed his guitar over the coffee table.

“I wear the pants in this family!” he yelled.

“Fuck you, I will crack you over the head with a frying pan and not think twice about it!” I screamed back.

“Great, so I’m not the man, even in my own family!” he screamed, and left, headed for the bar.

Jani and I had been married about two years. Although neither one of us wanted to admit it, our marriage was already on very thin ice. I still had a lot of resentment built up from the way he had treated me when I was pregnant, and now I was at the point where I had become disinterested in sex. I would hang out in Taylar’s room until after Jani had fallen asleep, develop mystery headaches—anything to avoid being intimate with my husband. I tried talking to my married friends about it. “Do you still have sex with your dude?” I’d ask, and most of them would nod. But I just wasn’t attracted to Jani anymore. We had no communication, and our life felt like a fairy tale in which we were mere actors, a prince and princess playing house and keeping secrets. I had started using coke again, here and there at parties, to take my mind off things. It was easier to pretend that nothing was wrong, rather than to acknowledge we had problems.

“You look nice,” I said. Jani was checking his hair in the hallway mirror before he left the house. He had a meeting with his attorney and was dressed up real fancy.

“Thanks, baby,” said Jani, kissing me on the cheek. “I’ll be
home soon.” The front door closed, and I heard his Mercedes pull out of the driveway. Taylar and I sat in front of the TV and watched
Barney & Friends
on VHS.

About an hour later, the phone rang. It was my friend Stacy. “Bobbie, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the manager of Tony’s Italian restaurant called me and Jani was just there with someone.”

“Yeah, he’s having lunch with his attorney.”

“Well, is his attorney a woman? Because they’re making out in the parking lot.”

Tony’s is a joint on Ventura Boulevard. I hadn’t been there in a while, but the manager and I had known each other since my early days in L.A. “Who is she?” I said quietly. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

“Some asshole named Shannon, apparently.”

Shannon, Shannon . . . oh,
Shannon
. She was dating Robbie Crane, who used to be in Ratt and was now in Vince Neil’s new solo band. Jani and Shannon had seemed to get along okay—they shot pool together one night, I remembered. She was a model, a brunette with light eyes and a slim figure. I hadn’t felt threatened by her at all, so confident was I of Jani’s devotion, but I had noticed that she seemed to compliment Jani a lot. And Jani had always been a sucker for a quick ego-boost.

A few hours later, Jani strolled in the door and laid his keys down. I had put Taylar to bed early. “I’m home! Man, it’s hot out there. I need a shower.” Jani went into our bedroom and started
getting undressed. I followed him and sat on the edge of the bed. “So how was your meeting?”

“It was great. We came up with some good ideas.”

“So I have a friend that runs this restaurant and he said that you were there with Shannon. Is that true, Jani?” Jani carried on unbuttoning his shirt. “Don’t be crazy, Bobbie.” His voice was higher than usual. “Well, Tony told me what y’all ordered, so I’m going to call the credit card company and just make sure that there are no charges for an order of the baby back ribs and spaghetti marinara. And some cheap red wine.”

Jani spun around to face me. His breath smelled kind of ribby, come to think of it. “You’ve got no right, Bobbie,” he snarled. “What about you and Vince, huh? I know all about it, so don’t try denying.”

“Oh, is that what Shannon told you? Well, let’s find out!”

On my vanity table was our cordless phone. I grabbed it and dialed Sharise’s number, my fingers trembling, and put the phone on loudspeaker.

“Hey, Sharise, so I’m here with Jani, and he wants to know if I have been having sex with your husband.”

“What the fuck?” said Sharise.

“Yeah, put Vince on the phone, please.” My voice was shaky.

“Sure, babe,” said Sharise.

Jani’s eyes were pleading with me to stop, but I was on a roll.

“Hey, Bobbie, it’s Vince. What’s up, honey?”

I told Vince to put the phone on loudspeaker so Sharise could hear.

“So I’m with Jani and he’s wondering if you and I have been having sexual relations. I would like you to confirm that no, in fact, I have never once seen or touched your dick. Correct?”

“Yes, that is correct,” said Vince, sounding confused.

“Okay, thanks, Vince. Now, one more question—how well do you know Shannon? Because she was making out with my husband tonight.”

“Wait . . . Shannon, Robbie’s girlfriend? I dunno, maybe you should ask Robbie, he’s right here.”

Jani’s face turned from purple to deathly white.

“Oh, great, could you put Robbie on the line too?”

“What’s going on?” I heard Robbie say in the background.

Sharise suggested we conference in Shannon, so that Robbie could ask her what was up.

“Great idea, Sharise,” I said. Jani tried to grab the phone from me, but I pushed him away, furious.

“Okay, hold on,” said Sharise. “What’s Shannon’s number, Robbie?”

Shannon’s line rang.

“Hello?”

“Shannon, it’s Robbie.”

“Hey, baby! I just got home from the gym. What’s cookin’?”

“Please tell me you are not sleeping with Jani Lane.” Jani was having a small heart failure in the background. There was a pause at the other end.

“Wait, Jani? What, you think I’m desperate or something?”

“Well, I have it on good authority that you were just with him, Shannon, so stop lying.”

“Robbie, just relax. I bet his wife is behind this. That bitch is crazy.”

“Yup, you bet I am,” I chimed in.

“Who is this?” said Shannon, confused.

“This is Bobbie Brown. I believe you had your tongue down my husband’s throat earlier? Have a nice day.”

I hung up the phone. Jani had already stormed out the front door. I didn’t see him for three days, which was no surprise. Even though he never abused alcohol at home, Jani’s drinking was becoming heavier as our marriage declined. He was drinking backstage, suffering blackouts and fits of anger. Jani’s erratic behavior was about more than just us; he was a damaged man in the throes of an identity crisis. It was no longer “cool” to like hair rock. When Jani walked into the offices of his record label, Columbia, and noticed that a framed poster of Warrant had been replaced by one of grunge stars Alice in Chains, he saw the writing on the wall, literally. He was in no shape to save himself or his career, let alone our marriage.

Something I’ve noticed in all my male friends who have been musicians—it really affects them when their careers start to flag, even just a little. One minute everyone is kissing their ass, and when they start to slip, they don’t know who to trust. That musical talent they have (often the only talent they have) is no longer in demand, and all the admiration disappears,
especially from girls. The declining rock star starts feeling insecure and desperate, and very often, the result is that he turns into an über-whore, sleeping with everything that moves, just so he can feel like a rock star again, even just for the night. To this day, if a girlfriend tells me she is dating a musician and he is messing around, I try to explain it to them.
Anybody
who seeks that much adoration at all times, who needs
that
much attention, is going to have trouble with fidelity. Date a rock star, and you are almost 100 percent going to get hurt, because there are very few guys in that scene who are going to reject hot pussy, ever. Unless you can deal with that, or get your own thing going on the side, I say run for the hills.

The shock of discovering without a shadow of a doubt that my husband was cheating could have sent me in one of two directions. I could have stayed home and faced the music. Or I could have gone to Miami and done a mountain of cocaine. I chose the latter.

I got off the plane in Miami and headed straight for the house that had been rented by my modeling agency. I had been booked for several catalog and swimwear shoots, and Flame had hooked me up with a dope suite on the beach, as well as a shared house where all the models could hang out. I had told Jani that I still loved him but that I needed some space. I took Taylar to my mom’s en route to Miami, where my girlfriend Jennifer
Driver, also a model, was waiting. Jennifer was a five-foot-eleven blond knockout with legs forever who had just been on the cover of
Playboy
, in their “Women of South Beach” issue, and would later date Axl Rose. She and I hung out at the house for nearly two weeks, while I pretended not to think about my problems back in L.A.

My friend Jimmy Franzo, the guy who had forced my ex Kenny to get on a plane out of L.A. a few years ago, had reinvented himself as a Miami clubland honcho, and he co-owned the most happening spot in town, Velvet. It was a true South Beach bacchanal, a nocturnal carnival with drag queens and hot lesbians and go-go dancers, and a candlelit VIP area with blue walls, chandeliers, and velvet couches. That’s where Jennifer and I found ourselves most nights, sipping champagne and putting the world to rights.

“So Tommy Lee is going to fly out and visit me tomorrow,” said Jennifer, looking a little excited, but not very.

“Cool,” I said, feeling like I needed another bump.
Miami coke is way better than L.A.’s,
I thought. “Wait, Tommy Lee from Mötley?”

“Yeah!”

“That’s exciting, girl,” I said, thinking back to being a teenager. “Tommy is so damn
cute
!”

Jennifer had been dating Tommy for a couple of weeks. He had seen her
Playboy
cover and contacted her agency to set up a date. Jennifer thought Tommy was okay, but she really liked the other guy she was seeing in Miami, a billionaire with a stake
in the Anheuser-Busch Company. “I think he, like, owns Budweiser?” said Jennifer, innocently shrugging her shoulders. She really was drop-dead gorgeous, and I didn’t blame her for playing the field. In fact, I felt old next to her. I was a mom, I was married, I had no dashing billionaires or Tommy Lees flying out to see me. Just one cheating husband, a head of freshly dyed black hair, and an eight ball of Miami’s finest.

A couple of days later, Tommy arrived. Jennifer was busy working, or seeing the Budweiser guy, so she asked me to keep Tommy entertained.

“Your hair looks nice,” said Tommy, peering over his sunglasses. We were eating lunch al fresco at some cute little Art Deco joint close to the beach.

Tommy and I had met a few times, out on the scene, but only very briefly. Tommy was always charming, but I’d never hung out with him one-on-one before. The fifteen-year-old inside me couldn’t believe she was sitting across the table from the hottest rock star on the planet. But I wasn’t about to let Tommy know that I had had a crush on him since high school. No way.

“So how’s Jani?” he asked.

“Things are tough, but we’re working on it,” I said, forcing down some salad. I had just done a line in the bathroom and food was the last thing on my mind. “How’s Mötley?”