Dirty Rocker Boys (9 page)

Unbeknownst to me, both Gunnar and his record label had been putting pressure on Matthew to break up with me. They feared my influence on him. I was opinionated, and if I didn’t like Matthew’s stage clothes, I would tell him, and he would listen. If I didn’t like a song, I would say so, and Matthew would bring it up with Gunnar. Which made Gunnar very nervous—the whole point of Nelson was that they were hair metal angels who
matched
. The last thing he needed was a Southern-fried Yoko Ono on his hands, messing with the program. Gunnar set about edging me out by making me feel as uncomfortable as possible.

Gunnar was constantly trying to initiate a threesome, for example, with me, him, and his brother. Thankfully, Matthew said no and stood his ground. They had had three-ways together
in the past, but when it came to me, Matthew wasn’t sharing. Even if he had been interested, I had told Matthew about my creepy almost ménage à trois with Steve and the lesbian, and had already made it clear I was not in the market for group sex. So Gunnar came up with other ways to try my patience. He would call me to come in his bedroom, and I’d walk in to find him naked on the bed. His girlfriend Laurel would casually walk in on me and take off her top. One night, the four of us were watching a movie when Laurel climbed on top of Gunnar and took all her clothes off. Then Gunnar started fingerbanging her, like, no biggie. I nudged Matthew in disbelief.

“Why are we okay with this?” I whispered. “Should we leave? What the fuck!”

I got up, left the room, and got in the shower. The bathroom was the only place I felt safe.

“Hey, you better quit eating all that cherry pie, Bobbie, you’re getting fat.”

Gunnar had burst in on me and was ogling my body.

“Get the fuck out of here, Gunnar!” I screamed.

Eventually, I knew I’d have to tell Matthew about his twin brother’s behavior. I dreaded the conversation. To make things worse, it seemed like we couldn’t escape “Cherry Pie.”

“And here we go again!” Matthew would half laugh, as the song came on the car radio for the millionth time that day. Deep down I knew he was threatened by Warrant’s success, and my connection to it. Then Jani really threw a spanner in the works.

My agent called me, sounding half frantic, half amused. “Um, did you tune into
The Howard Stern Show
today, Bobbie?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, Warrant were on the show, and Jani was talking about you.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t care who Matthew Nelson thinks he is, because he is in love with you and is going to marry you. Mr. Cherry Pie wants his Mrs. Cherry Pie, Bobbie.”

I couldn’t believe Jani—surely this had to be a joke. Right? Reluctantly, I told Matthew, before he found out from someone else.

“Ugh. Why would Jani say something like that?” he asked, looking sad. Gunnar was more direct.

“Why don’t you just fuck Jani already and put him out of his misery? Unless you already have, that is!” Some days, I really hated Gunnar. It felt like he didn’t want his brother to be happy.

It was true that Jani had been calling me a lot. Sometimes I would come home from work to find him hanging out with my roommate at our apartment. As soon as I walked in the room, all his attention would be focused on me. It was obvious he had a crush, and it was a little awkward—but now, with this radio shit, I had to put a stop to his flirting before people started getting the wrong idea. The next time Jani called me, I told him to lose my number. I reminded him that I already had a boyfriend. “I have your number, and I will use it if I want to, Jani.” He was crushed.

“Hey, Bobbie, check out
Star
magazine; you’re in it!” said Tracey Mikolas, head model booker at Flame.

Later that day at the supermarket, I grabbed a copy of
Star
and looked through the pages. What was Tracey talking about?
Ah.
There she was, my doppelgänger. A model by the name of Pamela Anderson, photographed with Scott Baio.

Who is she? And why is she hanging with Baio
? I wondered.

Pamela was five foot seven, I was five foot eight, and we were both blond bombshells with surfer girl appeal. She was two years older than me but had arrived in Hollywood the same year I did, 1989, after being spotted in the crowd at a BC Lions game in Vancouver, wearing a tight Labatt’s shirt. Hugh Hefner had made her his October 1989
Playboy
cover girl, so she moved to L.A., got a boob job, and was trying to make it big as a model. In 1990, just after I shot the “Cherry Pie” video, she and I were cast alongside each other. I was excited to meet my lookalike.

I met her on the set of
Married . . . with Children
, where we were playing Al Bundy’s fantasy blondes.

“Hey, I’m Bobbie,” I said.

“Hey,” said Pamela, flashing a quick smile and looking over my shoulder. She seemed disinterested.
About as friendly as a cornered rat,
I thought.
Oh well. Maybe she’s just shy.

In Al Bundy’s fantasy, Pamela and I were among four women lavishing him with attention on the couch, Pamela by one knee
and me at his other. Pamela would not stop stroking his leg up and down.

Pamela and I were blond girls with dreams, except I was perhaps more naïve than she. There were so many lessons I had yet to learn. How desirability will gain you admirers, but rarely will it gain you true love. How beauty opens many doors, but you should beware of where they lead. Pamela was more switched on to the realities of the game we were playing, as confident and self-assured as I seemed. I didn’t realize Hollywood could chew you up and spit you out just as quickly as it could fool you into believing you’re the hottest girl in town. I thought I was too special to get hurt, too down-to-earth to get suckered in.

“So
did
you sleep with Jani, Bobbie? Is that how you got the job?” Matthew’s eyes flashed. I had never seen him so angry. Things with him and me had hit rock bottom. I couldn’t believe that the tender lover who used to stroke my hair until I fell asleep at night was turning on me in this way.

We were four days into a vacation in Hawaii, and despite the rainbows, sunsets, and turquoise waters, things were ugly as can be. Matthew was still bitter about Jani’s gallant marriage proposal on
The Howard Stern Show
, even though I had argued that it was just for publicity, to bring attention to the video and
the song. And Jani had sparked other, completely unfounded suspicions in Matthew’s mind.

“Bobbie, I need to know what happened between you and Richard Grieco. Were you intimate with him, too? Gunnar told me he has photos.”

Gunnar had concocted some cock-and-bull story involving me and the actor Richard Grieco, which, like everything else that came out of Gunnar’s mouth, was a crock. Yes, I had met Richard at the Roxbury. And yes, he had asked for my number. So had Johnny Depp; so had Paul Stanley from Kiss (he was so effeminate, I assumed he was gay); so had a lot of guys in town. But I had hoped that by now, Matthew would have understood that I didn’t play around. It wasn’t fair that Gunnar was doing this to me, and to Matthew.

“Matthew, I have to tell you something. I wouldn’t believe everything Gunnar tells you. The truth is, he has been coming on to me.”

There, I said it.

Matthew was horrified. I knew he didn’t believe me. And even if he had, ultimately it wouldn’t have mattered. Blood is thicker than water, and in the heat of the moment, I had forgotten that nothing, not even love, was going to get in the way of Matthew and Gunnar Nelson’s careers.

“You should go home, Bobbie,” said Matthew, his voice cracking. “I can’t do this anymore.”

He helped me pack some clothes; then he drove me to the airport. “Are you okay?” he asked me. I couldn’t even speak. I
got on the first plane back to L.A., and cried the entire five-hour flight. Matthew had asked me to have my belongings out of the house by the time they got back from Hawaii, so as to avoid any further confrontation. Which gave me about three days to get my shit out. Tracey, my booker at Flame, came over and helped me pack up.

“Tracey, I’m so fucking hurt,” I said, shoving clothes into a duffel bag.

“Don’t get mad, Bobbie. Get even.”

An interesting proposition.
What would really get under Matt’s skin,
I wondered?

In a coat pocket, I found Kathy Conan’s number. She was the sweet girlfriend of Warrant’s guitarist.

“Hey, Kathy, so Matthew and I broke up. Just wanted to let you know.”

Exactly five minutes after Kathy and I hung up, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Bobbie, it’s Jani Lane.”

“This song is for Miss Bobbie Brown!”

Jani Lane dedicated “Heaven,” Warrant’s huge lighters-in-the-air ballad to me on our first date. As the stage lights exploded in Shreveport, Louisiana, I surveyed the screaming fans and privately noted that Matthew Nelson had never, not once, publicly dedicated a song to me.

“Jani’s so intense!” said my friend Tammy, who had come with me to the show. “He looks like he really means it, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, imagining Matthew’s face when he found out the Cherry Pie guy had dedicated a song to the Cherry Pie girl onstage. For a second, I wondered if maybe Jani was pursuing me as a publicity stunt—but no, Jani didn’t seem desperate enough for that. Manufacturing a love affair to boost record sales just didn’t seem his style.

Jani had bought me a ticket from Los Angeles to New Orleans. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone, combine my date with Jani with a visit back home. I hadn’t been back since leaving two years ago, and Baton Rouge seemed so dull. My
mom and Mr. Earl were just the same. The house was just the same. Everything was the same, except that I couldn’t step out the door without people recognizing me from
Star Search
or the “Cherry Pie” video.
Wow
,
am I famous?
I thought.
Maybe
.

Tammy and I made the swampy four-hour drive north from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, past small church towns and old plantations. By the time we arrived, my skin was sticky and hot. “I forgot about this damn Southern heat,” I said, splashing my face at a water fountain in the parking lot.

Warrant had just taken the stage in front of the packed venue. For all the rocker posturing, there was more to Jani Lane than the façade. He was truly charismatic. It was something to do with the way he moved, the way he commanded the stage. When he smiled, the room smiled with him. After the show, Tammy and I met up with Jani and the Warrant guys at a local bar. We drank Coors and shot pool. No velvet ropes, no VIP rooms. When the bar closed, the band called a taxi to take them to their hotel—they had to leave early the next morning to get to their next show.

“I want to come home with you, Bobbie,” said Jani.

“What about your show tomorrow?” I said.

“I’ll catch a plane, don’t worry about it. I want to fall asleep next to you.”

Tammy, Jani, and I went back to our motel room in Shreveport. Tammy passed out immediately in one of the two beds, and Jani and I lay together in the other. He was running his hand up and down my side, kissing my neck, tugging softly
on my jeans. I unbuttoned them, and he pulled them down, then my panties. All thoughts of Matthew drifted away as Jani unbuckled his pants and slowly, quietly, did what we’d both been thinking about all night.

In the morning, I acted like it was nothing. In the early ’90s, sexual mores were still just as freewheeling as they had been in the ’80s. You could sleep with someone on the first date and own it. As Jani waited for his taxi to take him to the airport, he said he wanted to see me again.

“Let me fly you out next time I play a show?” he said, taking my hands and kissing me.

“Maybe.”

On our way back from Shreveport, I made Tammy pull over at a small occult shop I had visited a few times in the past. Inside was a guy who looked like your average Joe, but he was a voodoo doctor, the real deal. My grandpa John had told me witch doctors would go into the swamps to dig up roots and wild plants for their medicines and potions. He told me about women who made magical dolls, and about the power of New Orleans gris-gris. I had grown up with my head swimming with tales of hoodoo, rootwork, and Southern conjure. I believed in magic, and I still do.

“I want you to cast a spell on Matthew Nelson that takes away his money, love, and success,” I told the voodoo doctor. “You have to be careful with revenge spells—sometimes they come back around,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” He gave me a black fabric voodoo doll, a black
candle, and some black-arts oil. Then he wrote down some instructions.

When I got back to L.A., I spent nine days in my newly rented apartment performing magic. “First, anoint the black candle with the oil,” read the instructions. I had to burn the candle for seventeen minutes each day, for nine days. While it burned, I held the candle in my left hand and cursed Matthew Nelson, dripping the wax all over the doll’s body. It stared back at me with its helpless button eyes.

“May Nelson’s career suck forever!”

“May Matthew Nelson never love anyone more than me!”

After the ninth day of incantations, I put what was left of the candle in a small box along with the doll, a small bottle of rum, and nine cents. I wrapped it in black cloth and tied it with twine. I was supposed to take it to a cemetery and bury it, but that was too creepy. So I shoved it behind some boxes and asked the black-magic gods to get to work ASAP.

“So, Bobbie, we hear you’ve been seeing someone.”

I was being interviewed live on KROQ, L.A.’s biggest rock music radio station. Sometimes the DJs would call me and ask me questions about what was happening on the Strip.

Had someone photographed me with Jani in Shreveport maybe?
Oh well, the cat’s out of the bag,
I thought.

“Yes, we heard you were at the Cathouse last night, making out with Taime Downe.”