Dirty Rocker Boys (18 page)

Most of my furniture from when I lived with Jani was in Tommy’s storage unit, so I grabbed the storage unit key that was hanging on the wall, booked a moving van, and went to the unit the following day. When Tommy was released from jail, he must have noticed the key missing, because I opened the door to the unit to find one of Tommy’s associates guarding it. As soon as he saw me, he pulled out a gun and pointed it at my head.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

He was skinny, with long hair. I knew he was a yes-guy to Tommy, but this was crazy.
What is this,
The Godfather? I thought. I just wanted my couch. I backed away slowly, aghast. No couch was worth getting shot for by Tommy’s buddy.

“Have a nice day,” he said, slamming the door.

Still, Tommy just wouldn’t stop calling. He sent Jay Gordon over to try and hoodwink me into meeting up with him. Jay invited me out for dinner and secretly told Tommy where we were going. When we walked into the restaurant and I saw Tommy there, I couldn’t believe it. Tommy came up to me.

“Bobbie—”

“Jay, I can’t believe you set me up. I’m leaving!”

I went home and scribbled furiously in my journal. It was the only way I could offload the emotion.

I’ve tried not to love you, tried to forget you and get on with my life. I recall all the madness, the midnight quarrels, the angry silences and wounding words. Then I remember your smile and the love we once felt. I remember your favorite things in the refrigerator and the love letters you used to fax to me from the road. Your too-tight embraces as we drifted off to sleep. The morning love and our walks on the beach after dinner. Most of all our laughter, so loud and long we forgot what was funny. Last but not least, our shared dreams of our future together. Then my heart aches and impulsively I want to run to your door, share your bed, caress your hair, watch movies, eat root-beer floats, feed the dogs, then laugh some more . . . and share buried hurt. It’s then that I miss us most, because quarreling with you has meant more to me than laughing with anyone.

Tommy left me a message saying we needed to talk, and we arranged to meet at a restaurant in Malibu for dinner. He showed up holding twenty or so photos of us together, from happier times. All it did was make me feel defeated. How would we ever be able to be that happy again? “I can’t do this, Tommy. I just can’t.”

Throughout our breakup he had been throwing Pamela’s name into the mix, threatening to spend time with her. We
both knew she had the hots for him. Even when we were still together, she had a friend of hers call him saying she wanted to hang out. She had a goal, and when Pamela heard we were broken up, it was on. I heard through the grapevine that she and Bret Michaels had broken up. I told Sharise about it. We were in her car and looked at each other like, “Oh no.” We both saw what was coming.

On New Year’s Eve, I tried to celebrate as best I could—which was hard, as I found myself at the same party as Tommy, there with Pamela Anderson. What a surprise.

“Fuck!” said Sharise, nodding toward them. They were at a table, flirting, drinking, and laughing. “You okay?”

“Sure,” I said, playing it cool. Nonetheless, our friend Becky Mullen marched up to their table.

“What you’re doing is really fucked-up, Tommy,” she said. “Don’t be flirting with other people in front of Bobbie.”

“Dude, why’d you do that?” I said when she came back. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want them thinking I cared. Of course I cared. I was just very good at pretending to be a hard-ass.

Even after that, Tommy continued to call. Sometimes he’d be sweet, sometimes he’d dangle the Pamela threat, trying to make me jealous. But I stood my ground. Shortly before Valentine’s Day, Tommy convinced me to let him come over to my new place. Within minutes the situation had degenerated into a huge fight. In the heat of the moment, he took a bottle and threw it at the wall. Red wine splattered across the room, droplets hitting my daughter’s face. I looked at my little girl, her skin dripping
with Merlot. It was like a scene out of
Carrie
. She started crying, and I flipped out. “Get the fuck out of here! You destroy everything! I don’t have a dime and you are kicking holes in the wall and breaking things in the presence of my daughter.” As he drove home, Tommy called me, crying. A Mary J. Blige song had come on the radio, and it was killing him listening to the lyrics, he said.

I’m goin’ down

Cause you ain’t around, baby

“I’m really sad,” he said.

“I’m really sad too.”

“I’m sorry.”

As in love as we were, it was just obvious nothing was going to work itself out with us. There was nothing more to say. I knew that in relationships, once things reach a certain point, they don’t get better, they only get worse. That night, I knew we were officially over.

Two days later, Tommy left a message on my answering machine.

“I’m in Cancún with Pamela Anderson. We have sex toys. I’m going to fuck her really hard.”

Just the sound of his voice made my stomach churn. I played the message to Sharise.

“Listen to this motherfucker.”

We made his message into my voice mail greeting, Sharise and I yelling, “Leave a message after the douchebag,” at the end. Tommy was furious. “Come on, Bob, that’s not cool, what the fuck? Please get rid of it, Bobbie, I’m really sorry.”

Two days after that, the phone rang—it was our mutual friend Bobby, calling long-distance from Mexico. By this point, Tommy and I had been officially broken up exactly four days.

“Bobbie, I’m in Cancún with Tommy and Pamela, and they’re getting married. Tommy wanted me to call and let you know.”

“Right. Whatever, dude, they deserve each other, they’re both fucking assholes,” I said. “Hold on—you
are
kidding, right?”

Bobby described the chain of events to me. Pamela had flown out to Cancún on a photo shoot, right around the time Tommy and I were breaking up. The day he smashed the wine bottle in my house, Tommy called Pamela and told her he was getting on a plane. Tommy landed, they had dinner, and Tommy proposed. Three days later, on February 18, they went to a hospital at two in the morning to get their blood tests done. And then, all of day four of their relationship, they were tying the knot.
What kind of joke did Tommy think he was playing on me now?

All day long, Bobby called me with the play-by-play breakdown of the day’s surreal events.

“They’re saying they’re really in love.”

“No shit!” I screamed.

“They just got married, Bobbie, on the beach.”

“They really got married? You weren’t fucking with me?”

“They are married, Bobbie.”

In a furious daze, I called every journalist I knew and told them to come to my apartment. Within twenty minutes
People
magazine,
Us Weekly
,
Star
, and a camera crew from
American Journal
had shown up. They sat in front of me, expectant and slightly confused. I tried to steady my nerves. I didn’t want to cry in front of them. “I would like to inform the press that my fiancé, Tommy Lee, married Pamela Anderson on the beach in Cancún this afternoon. Perhaps you’d like to visit them to pass on my congratulations.” I told them the name of their hotel and their room number.

“Don’t you want any money for this, Bobbie?” one of the journalists asked, and I said no. This wasn’t about money. This was about my heart, which had just been broken into a million pieces.
American Journal
wanted to interview me on camera. I shouldn’t have agreed, but I did. When the interview played on TV afterward, I was horrified. I was super skinny, crying, a mess. I never meant for the world to see me like that. I felt humiliated. But the humiliation had just begun.

I watched the tragicomedy unfold on TV, in the tabloids, around the world. They called it a “Madcap Marriage.” I saw the photos of Pamela, barefoot and in a white bikini on the beach with Tommy, and eight guests, many of them my friends, lying on sun loungers holding cocktails in plastic cups while a Mexican guy in a white suit read their vows. Even behind her aviator sunglasses, I could tell Pamela was wasted. Bobby said
they were all on ecstasy. Then they kissed, and Tommy tossed Pamela into the Caribbean. Sadly, she didn’t drown. Pamela’s own mother found out about the wedding by reading about it in
People
magazine. It was the first she had heard of Tommy Lee, and she called the whole thing “heartbreaking and shocking.” I knew exactly how she felt.

Biker coffee, glass, crank, whatever you want to call it—it’s a dirty chemistry that gives rise to speed. They make it in laboratories far, far away from Tinseltown; in trailers in Desert Hot Springs, or manufacturing plants in Guadalajara. Sudafed pills, Drano, lighter fluid, rubbing alcohol, paint thinner, red phosphorus from matchbooks, iodine, and battery acid create an inhumane and potent brew that leaves the user wide-eyed and sweaty, fingers tapping on tables, thoughts rushing with unhinged intensity. Life becomes the thing that happens in between key bumps in bathrooms, or breaking up lines with maxed-out cards. Then you grind your teeth on the dance floor as the flashing lights tell you things in languages only you can understand. Outside, the trees seem alive, clouds flicker like strobes, and the wind seems to quote lines from movies. The sun is always a little too bright. I was running while standing still, floating when I walked. The car rides, talking talking talking, the conversations that meant so much and would count for nothing the second I walked into my upper-middle-class condo in the Valley, remembering that
my lover was with someone else. I wanted to scratch my nails down my cheeks until they bled.

There was a knock at the door. I opened it, hoping it might be Tommy, saying this had all been a big prank, one of his jokes. But it was my mother, looking stern. “Tommy wrote me a letter, Bobbie, saying you are a drug addict. I’ve come to get Taylar because I don’t want my granddaughter around that nonsense.” I slammed the door in her face. “Fuck you! We’re fine!” I didn’t want my mom around, judging me, seeing what a failure I really was. But she kept knocking and knocking, until I let her back in. She was horrified at how skinny I was—around ninety pounds at the time. She told me how she had gotten Tommy’s letter the day before he married Pamela. “I wrote him back saying ‘fuck you,’ ” said my mom, who, as I mentioned before, almost never curses. “And I told him, ‘If anything bad happens to my daughter because of all this, I am going to hold you
personally
responsible.’ ” My mother took Taylar back to Louisiana with her. From that point, Taylar’s childhood would be a merry-go-round, with her going back and forth between L.A. and my mom’s, depending on how messed up I was over some guy, or the drugs. That’s the only true regret I have in my life: that thanks to drugs, “love,” and my own dysfunction, I was so rarely able to be the mother I wanted to be.

As my mom left, she told me to pull myself together. “Get over it, Bobbie. He wasn’t good for you.” I wished getting over Tommy could have been that simple. I was on antidepressants but none of them worked. All I wanted to do was stay in bed in the fetal position and cry. The only thing that would get me
moving was speed. At least when I was high, I had the energy to try to forge ahead with my day, even though the guy I was in love with had just gotten married and it was all over the news.

Every time I left my apartment, there they were, on the newsstands. They were going out of their way to court every possible photo opportunity, and Pamela was all about the publicity. It was sickening. I felt like an unwilling observer, trapped in their romance, forced to watch them kiss every day, all day long. People would come up to me saying, “Hey, it’s really sad about Tommy,” which made me feel even worse. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.

*  *  *

“Bobbie? Bobbie, are you okay? Let us in!”

It was my friend Annie, knocking on the front door. I opened the door, my face smeared with mascara. She was with her boyfriend Doug. They had just come from Tommy and Pamela’s wedding reception, where Doug, who I had introduced to Tommy, had been best man.

Naturally, they felt guilty about having to split their loyalties. But I wasn’t angry, I was just grateful that they were there with me. “Pamela is such a retard,” said Annie, giving me a hug. The reception had been a lavish, over-the-top affair, with Tommy dressed in a suit of armor. “A suit of armor? That’s weird,” I sniffed, pouring more wine.

Pamela had already been doing all she could to wipe me off the face of Hollywood.
Playboy
was already off-limits, thanks to
her. Now,
Baywatch
. I had been on a series of auditions, vying for a role in the show, auditions that had started as Tommy and I were breaking up. Getting that part would have been a lifeline, a chance to start my career over. The producers could not decide between me and Gena Lee Nolin. Unsurprisingly, Pamela stepped in at the eleventh hour and told them there was no way she would work with me. It was understandable, but it wasn’t fair. The role went to Gena.

At the wedding reception, Doug and Annie had met one of Tommy’s friends, a singer by the name of Mark McGrath. Mark was in a band called Shrinky Dinx (after the Shrinky Dinks toy), which would soon change its name to Sugar Ray. Mark had came over with Doug and Annie—I think they were hoping Mark might lift my spirits. Their instincts had been correct.

“Girl, I would eat your pussy for eighteen hours straight, if it helped,” he said, moments after being introduced, startling me into laughter. Mark had zero filter. And he was funny. His inappropriate humor was bringing me out of my depressive funk for a minute. I wanted to see him again. “Mark, I have a modeling shoot tomorrow. Will you come with me?” I asked him at the end of the night. I just didn’t want to be alone. “Sure,” he said, without a thought, and I loved him immediately.

Mark’s band Sugar Ray was not known yet, so he wasn’t busy, touring all the time like Tommy had been. We started hanging out every day doing silly mundane stuff: grocery shopping, picking up underwear at Sears. Stuff that helped me maintain some illusion of sanity. And of course, when the daytime chores had
been taken care of, we partied. Mark and I were out at a club one night when a small brunette girl came up and tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, I’m Carin, Mark’s girlfriend.”
What?!
Mark hadn’t mentioned anything about having a girlfriend.
Is this a joke?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For the record, there’s nothing going on between us. Maybe you need to talk to Mark about this, not me.” Mark walked up to us, looking guilty. For a second, I hated him. “You guys have fun working this out. I’m leaving,” I said, heading for the door.
Is there any man in this town who isn’t a liar?
I thought, hurt. Mark looked at me, then at Carin. Then at me and back at Carin. “I’m sorry, Carin, I’m going with Bobbie,” he said, darting after me. (They had not been dating for a long time, though he is married to her today.)