Dirty Rocker Boys (4 page)

“Bobbie are you
driving
?”

I put on the parking brake, just like Penny had showed me, unfastened my seat belt, and got out of the car.

“Yes, I’m an excellent driver.”

My mom stormed over to the passenger door, opened it, and lifted Adam gently out of the car, holding him close. “There are going to be some changes around here, mark my words,” she said, madder than I’d ever seen her. I got my ass whipped pretty hard that night.

When I was in my mid-teens, and in the ninth grade, my mom finally left Bobby for good. One night she woke me and my brother and we tiptoed out of the house, into a new life. She had been planning it in secret for a long time. Our new home was farther away from my friends, and smaller, a three-bedroom townhome. But I didn’t care—I was tired of the nights of driving around the bars looking for my dad. I was tired of lying as flat as I could on the floorboard of the car, trying to make myself disappear. I was tired of my mom having to find him, sometimes with another woman, always drunk.

Bobby had started picking on my little brother, which really riled me. I started purposely provoking my dad, hitting him hard on the back of the head with a comb while he was watching
TV, calling him names. I would stand, silent, watching him pick a belt out of the closet, or a switch out of the tree. “I’m going to spank you till you cry,” he would tell me. But I never let myself shed a tear. They would well in my eyes, but I never let them fall. When my mom told me she was filing for divorce, I felt relieved. And this time when Bobby tried to win her back, it didn’t work.

Mr. Earl LeSage was everything my father wasn’t—soft-spoken, softhearted, and practically a teetotaler. He never raised his voice, and he agreed with absolutely everything my mother said. He had a successful flooring and carpeting business, and had met my mom when he did our floors. She was still married to my dad at the time, and Mr. Earl was married too, but it was clear from day one that he would do anything to help her. Sometimes that meant trying to find my dad a job, just so that he could pay our bills. Mr. Earl was always putting in a good word for Bobby, not because he liked him, but because he hated to see my mom suffer. When Judy finally left Bobby, Mr. Earl was also freshly divorced, and waiting with open arms.

Mr. Earl had grown up poor, but had worked very hard to make his business a success. He was kind and caring, and my mom, after years of fighting and struggling with Bobby, finally started to understand what a truly loving relationship could feel like. She fell madly in love, and even quit wearing high heels,
so she wouldn’t tower over him (he was shorter than her). They made a handsome couple. Mr. Earl always knew how to dress—he wore snakeskin cowboy boots and belts that matched, with slacks and a nice ironed shirt, and he had a quite collection of cowboy hats. He was a gentle man who loved nature, and his favorite thing in the world, perhaps, apart from my mom, was his garden. Corn, beans, potatoes, turnips—you name it, he grew it. He always grew the plumpest, reddest tomatoes in town, the size of small pumpkins and ten times as sweet.

After my mom married Mr. Earl, she, my brother, and I moved in with him into this big old house on four acres of land just outside Baton Rouge. It was pretty there, although the summers were almost intolerably hot. And there was no escaping the lovebugs. Lovebugs (they’re also known as “honeymoon flies,” and “kissing bugs,”) look like flies that are connected by the tail in pairs, stuck to each other for days after they mate. They would drift in huge, slow clouds in the late summer and if your car ran into one of the swarms, you’d have to clean them off right away; otherwise the acid in their blood could strip your paintwork.

“Love hurts,” I would sing, as I hosed down my mom’s car for the tenth time that week, spraying off the insect carcasses. At night I would sit on the porch with my brother, plug in one of those ultraviolet bug zappers, and listen to the sharp buzz the lamp made as it fried the lovebugs pair by pair. I daydreamed about what summers might be like in other places, places that weren’t hot and sticky and full of dead bugs. Places
like Los Angeles, with its swaying palm trees, beaches, and rock music.

I had heard that Tommy Lee lived in L.A. This is pertinent because when I was fifteen, Tommy Lee was my absolute number one crush, and my entire bedroom was covered in Mötley Crüe posters. I loved to watch their videos on MTV, and I thought they were
way
cool for wearing makeup.
When I do it for the first time, it’s gonna be with Tommy Lee,
I’d think, staring at Tommy on the wall, his lips pouting, blowing obscene kisses my way. Mr. Earl did not understand my Mötley Crüe fascination one bit. One time, when he drove me, my mom, and my brother to Disney World in Orlando—an eight-hour drive—I insisted on blasting Mötley’s
Shout at the Devil
the whole entire way. “But this is the
future
,” I yelled, every time Mr. Earl tried to turn the music down.

I had made a new friend over the summer, Deanna. We were going to start high school together and I hoped she and I could become best friends. Unbeknownst to me, Deanna had a huge crush on a boy called Mark DuVall. Mark was a year older than us and very handsome. He had invited me to go to the movies a few times, and I was hoping that once we started high school, he might ask me to be his girlfriend. I had mentioned this to Deanna. She smiled, but I guess she wasn’t happy about it.

“Hey, you wanna try my mom’s tanning bed? It’ll make you
look like you’ve been playing beach volleyball all summer,” she said. I had never used a tanning bed before. Twenty-five minutes later, I emerged from the coffin-like bed. My skin felt crispy, brittle.

“You look amazing!” said Deanna, smirking.

A few days later I enrolled at Starkey Academy, a private high school in East Baton Rouge County, with burns all over my face. I was covered in hundreds of tiny painful blisters, swollen and oozing and red as Mr. Earl’s tomatoes. Even talking hurt.

“What setting did Deanna have the tanning bed on?” asked my mom, shaking her head as she dabbed chamomile lotion onto my face that morning. “Doesn’t she know you have Irish blood?”

“I look cremated,” I sobbed.

My mom’s rule was that unless you were puking or bleeding, you weren’t missing school. Having an incinerated face didn’t count, so I had to walk the halls looking like a burn victim for days, until the blisters went away. Then my skin started peeling, and I just looked like a leper. I was too embarrassed to even talk to Mark DuVall, who assumed I didn’t like him anymore, and started dating Deanna. With that, the penny dropped. Some girls, I realized, will stop at nothing to get what they want. My very first lesson in love.

“Just stay there—
don’t move
.”

I had Dirk Arnold pinned to the backseat of his car. Leather seats squeaked in tandem with the frogs croaking outside as I French-kissed him. Fifteen minutes later, I was done. His entire neck was covered in hickeys. “I want everyone to know that you’re mine,” I said proudly. Dirk examined himself in the mirror. “Gosh, I wonder what my mom’s gonna think,” he mumbled.

Something had happened to my personality since my mom divorced my dad, a slow but noticeable blossoming. From being the moody girl who would scuff her shoes on purpose and downplay her looks, I started walking with my head held high, just like the models in the fashion magazines I was starting to collect. These days I listened to my mom, especially when she told me I was pretty. When she showed me how to apply lipstick and how to fix my hair, I listened, rather than pushing her away. My mom, delighted at this newfound closeness with her daughter, loved nothing more than taking me shopping. Finally,
bonded by retail, we were on the same page. And I looked good. Really good.

Maybe that’s why Dirk, my first boyfriend, didn’t mind that I was somewhat of a goofball. We would sit in his car for hours listening to Def Leppard, making out until our lips were shredded and my chin was raw from his stubble. I had started teasing my hair just like the hair metal girls I saw on MTV, wearing tight acid-wash jeans with tears in the butt and off-the-shoulder white T-shirts. I posed for photos with friends, pouting and pretending I was a music video star like Tawny Kitaen.

Dirk’s sister was Lacey Arnold. She was the same age as me, and a welcome third wheel in our relationship. We always had the best times together. At night we would sneak out of our folks’ houses, driving their mom’s car into town, ducking every time we saw a cop. We’d go to underground clubs in Baton Rouge and dance until it was two in the morning, everyone around us high on ecstasy. We didn’t even know what ecstasy was at that point—we just loved to dance. Late at night we would sneak back home and crawl into bed, getting up bleary-eyed for school in the morning.

“Hey, Boobless! This seat taken?”

Boys, especially the ones who knew they didn’t have a chance, had been calling me Boobless Bobbie for years, thanks to my boyish figure and pancake-flat chest. One morning on the school bus, after a long night of dancing and yet another mean Boobless Bobbie jibe, I blew my top.

“Whatever, cheese dick, I’m going to be a model one day, so I’m
supposed
to have no tits.”

I was
obsessed
with models. I spent all my pocket money on fashion magazines, not to read the articles but to look at the girls. I would study their poses and marvel at the symmetry of their faces. They were all tall and skinny like me, with full lips and powerful cheekbones and almond eyes. Maybe looking goofy wasn’t such a bad thing after all. My favorite models were Christy Turlington, Stephanie Seymour, and Paulina Porizkova. I liked Paulina the most. She was Czech-American, with piercing blue eyes and fine features, and eventually married Ric Ocasek from the rock band the Cars. I thought hers was the most exotic beauty I had ever seen before. I kept photo albums filled with pages I had torn from magazines featuring Paulina and my favorite models in their high-fashion ad campaigns. My boyfriends never understood it. “I think she looks like a snake,” said Dirk, as I pointed out Paulina’s latest spread in
Vogue
. “You’re prettier,” he added, and I didn’t get it. I thought blondes were so American pie-ish and boring. I wondered if maybe one day I could dye my hair and look just as sexy and imported as my idol. They just didn’t make girls like her in Baton Rouge.

Blond and apple pie as I was, I still wondered if maybe, just maybe, I had a shot at being a model too. I didn’t want to be a secretary or a nurse or a teacher, and with my grades, it didn’t look like a glittering academic career lay ahead of me. My mom had never gone to college, and there wasn’t much pressure for me to succeed scholastically. “Being pretty is what you’re best at,” my mom said when I asked her if she thought I had a shot
at being in the magazines. “If you want to make a living at it, why not? We all have to work with what we’ve got, Bobbie.”

My family never raved about my exceptional good looks, but the consensus was Bobbie Brown’s looks were probably her greatest—possibly her only real—asset. And if she didn’t want to use her prettiness, well . . . Subway was hiring. They would have loved me just as much either way, and it was comforting, knowing there was no huge pressure on me to succeed. But I didn’t see myself making foot-long subs in Baton Rouge for the rest of my life. No way.

My new best friend was Mona, a petite girl with big breasts and four sisters all as pretty as she was. She became an ally in my quest to become pretty enough to be a model. But what were we going to do about that chest of mine? I was still flat as a pancake.

“If you drink Dr Pepper, your tits will grow,” she told me.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Positive.”

I drank so much Dr Pepper that summer my tongue turned brown. Sad to say, my chest refused to blossom. All that sugar, combined with the disappointment, made me testy, to say the least. I tried not to care about having boobs anymore, and now that I knew I wanted to become a model, I sure as hell didn’t care about school anymore either.

I became a total brat in the classroom, talking back if I didn’t agree with something. What my teachers didn’t know was that
for me, getting sent to the principal’s office was no biggie—the school principal was Mona’s father, and he always let me off with a warning and some candy. I was starting to learn that in life, it really is about who you know.

T-Boy was probably the cutest boy in all Baton Rouge. He was five foot nine, muscular, and very athletic. He was on the football team and wore a letterman jacket. With his brown hair, brown eyes, and juicy lips, he looked like Taylor Lautner run through a 1980s spin cycle. Meow. One night I was sleeping over at a friend’s house when T-Boy and a couple of other popular guys came over. There I was, in the kitchen, raiding the fridge in my pajamas, when T-Boy taps me on the shoulder and whispers in my ear.

“I like you, Bobbie. May I call you sometime?”

I had broken up with Dirk, and this kid was an Adonis. So I gave him my number and soon after, we were official. About six months in, I figured it was time we got down to business.

“We should probably have sex, right?” I said to T-Boy one night at my friend Melissa’s house. He looked surprised.

“Okay, if you’re sure you’re ready?”

My first time was more of a first attempt, because neither of us knew what the hell we were doing. I assumed T-Boy was experienced and would show me the ropes, but actually, he was
just as clueless as I was. I didn’t even know that you were supposed to open your legs. T-Boy rubbed up and down between my closed thighs for an hour before we called it off due to chafing. After two months of fruitless thigh humping, T-Boy made a suggestion.

“Hey, Bobbie, maybe you should try, you know, spreading them open a little?”

I had no clue what he was talking about.

“Try putting your knees to your chest—they really like that,” Mona told me.
Thank God for girlfriends,
I thought.