Dirty Rocker Boys (24 page)

I remembered explaining to Jay, back when I had just broken
up with Tommy, how sex between friends really does change everything. I was right. Once you get strung out on your dick, it’s over. Done. We’re conquered. When I’m with someone, I flatter him, make him feel special, like he’s ten men, even if he’s not. And that is a mistake, by the way. Do not do that, ladies. Don’t ever let him know that he is completely satisfying you, because as soon as you do, it’s over. That’s what I have learned, every single time. Hey, I am forty-three, and I am
just
figuring this out.

I should have just listened to Taylar. She
hated
Jay. She thought he looked like a cross between Frankenstein and Edward Scissorhands, and was embarrassed to be seen with him. Whenever he tried to talk to her, she would roll her eyes and say, “Ugh.” When we asked her to give us some privacy, she would curl up in a ball and refuse to leave the room. One time Jay dropped her off at school for me and she was mortified. “Mom, why did you do that to me? He looks like Frankenscissors and his hair is like a burnt match. Don’t
ever
do that to me again!” When he came over to the house wearing his super-high goth platform shoes, with his spiky black-and-white hair and shaved eyebrows, she would look at me as if to say,
Are you fucking kidding me?
I should have trusted Taylar’s intuition—it was much more finely tuned than her mom’s at that point.

Jay and I were going through an off period, during which he had started hanging out with Rod Stewart’s daughter Kimberly. Like all of Jay’s girlfriends, she was threatened by me, because even when Jay and I weren’t
together
together, we were usually still together, and I would usually be trying to win him back. They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and Kimberly had suggested hooking me up with her dad, who was single. I wasn’t especially keen. Years ago, I had met Rod Stewart at the Roxbury and hadn’t been impressed. “Can I get you anything?” he said, leaning on the bar next to me. “Cranberry vodka?” I said. “No, I meant Ferrari, Porsche, Jaguar?”
What a cheesetard,
I thought.

But I was bored, and jealous of Jay and Kimberly, so I agreed to go on a double date with them. I got ready over at Jay’s house, and Jay did my makeup; then I showed up with my ex-boyfriend for my blind date with his new girlfriend’s dad. Kids, Hollywood is not a normal place. Seriously. But by this point, I had gotten used to the surreal nature of my life.

Rod was in his midfifties and looked a lot older than I remembered. He had recently separated from his second wife, Rachel Hunter, and was sweet and gentlemanly, but I felt very little attraction and made my excuses as to why I had to leave. “Okay, so why don’t we go out another time?” he said. “Let’s have fun!” When he said “fun” I pictured him running a hot bath naked, looking over his shoulder, smiling, his balls like
socks with rocks in them, hanging to his knees. I told that to Jay and he told me to stop grossing him out.

Rod and I met up again with Kimberly and Jay at a club. We were sitting at our table when all of a sudden a whole gang of girls joined us. One was a girl I was not too fond of, because I had heard that she had slept with Jay while we were together. She was sitting right next to Kimberly, and they were joking and whispering.
They’re so cunty,
I thought. “I am not sitting at this table with
certain
people,” I announced coldly. “Oh, come on, no drama please,” said Rod.

“Your daughter is being a total bitch.”

Rod tried to ease the tension by being funny. “Feel my thigh,” he said.

“No, thanks.”

“Go on, feel my thigh—I play soccer.”

I prodded his thigh with my forefinger and thumb in three spots. “Yeah, it’s really awesome.”

“Do you want to go to my place and Jacuzzi?”

Ugh, not the Jacuzzi line.
You can’t go anywhere in Hollywood without some douchetard trying to get you in his hot tub. I pictured Rod bending over, naked, and puked a little in my mouth.

“Do you think I carry a bikini in my back pocket or something?”

Rod called me a “silly bird” or a “tart” or some English slang word I did not understand. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means ‘dumb whore,’ ” said my nemesis.

Rod, desperate to avert the catfight that was about to erupt, whispered in my ear.

“If you want my body and if you think I’m sexy . . .” I couldn’t believe this guy was for real.

“I don’t know, Rod, perhaps we should get Maggie May and ask her?” I spat. Rod looked at me, appalled. “Actually, I have a better idea.”

I got on the table, bent over, and shoved my ass in his face, spilling his drink in his lap. Then I hopped off the table and marched out of the building.
Fuck Rod, fuck Jay, fuck Kimberly, and fuck that other bitch
. If there was one thing I had gotten good at over the years, it was not giving a fuck.

One day in 2005, I got a phone call from my mom I’ll never forget.

“Earl’s really sick, Bobbie. You need to come home.”

Mr. Earl, thanks to a lifetime of smoking, had been diagnosed with emphysema. My mom suggested I move back home to spend time with him, and to reconsider my future.

“Bobbie, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think that you need a backup plan in your life,” said my mom. “Enough of this Hollywood nonsense. I mean, look where it’s gotten you.” She said I should come home to Baton Rouge permanently, go back to school, and train for another, more stable
career, because it didn’t look like this whole Tinseltown thing was going anywhere for me now. I surveyed the last fifteen years of my life—a catalog of missed opportunities and bad life decisions. I was even starting to have regrets about divorcing Jani.
Maybe we could have made it work.
I knew I had to move back home and try to remember what was really important, and spend time with Mr. Earl. Taylar and I packed up my car and drove to Louisiana. At age thirty-six, I moved back in with my parents.

Dragging my suitcases up my mom’s porch steps, I felt like the world’s biggest loser. Stripped of the parties and the velvet ropes, who was I?

“I hear they’re hiring at Subway,” my mom suggested, and I wanted to cry. I gave my old bedroom to Taylar and slept in a sleeping bag on the porch every night. I remembered those evenings as a teenager, watching the love bugs fry. I never imagined life would bring me right back here, to where it all started. Except this time I was broke, divorced, and lonely.

Following my mom’s advice, I enrolled in Aveda esthiology school an hour away and started studying skin care. “Bobbie Brown? You’re famous!” my classmates would say, and I would pretend like I didn’t know what they were talking about. “She’s my cherry pie!”
Ugh.
I was embarrassed by the attention. I didn’t want to remember I was Bobbie Brown, the Cherry Pie girl who had it all and fucked it up.

Mr. Earl had been awake for days refusing to lie down because he knew, somehow, that if he did, it would be over.
Finally, exhausted, he told my mom he was going to take a nap. She lay next to him and they slept awhile. His oxygen machine was still on. After an hour or so she got up. Later she went in to check on him again, but he had stopped breathing. My brother was out back, having band rehearsal with his friends, when he heard my mom’s screams. Mr. Earl had been on so many steroids, he weighed three hundred pounds, but my brother was like Superman—he lifted him off the bed, onto the floor, and spent forty-five minutes giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while we waited for the ambulance. But Mr. Earl never woke up. Adam called me on my cell. “Bobbie, Mr. Earl died, you gotta come home from school.” It was a week before graduation.

My father, Bobby, went with me to the funeral. We held each other as we cried. Mr. Earl had accepted my father back into the family, and when he died, we knew the world had lost a truly kind man. The death of Mr. Earl put things in perspective—you just never know how long anyone is going to be around. I bought my dad a lighter and had it engraved with the words
I LOVE YOU, DAD,
and gave it to him a couple days after Mr. Earl’s funeral. We were at breakfast, and I noticed my dad wasn’t eating a thing. “I just don’t have an appetite anymore, BJ,” he said. “Well, you need to go get checked out,” I said. “I refuse to bury you too, Dad.”

Bobby seemed to be in a good place in his life. He was running a bar, and I was helping him out on weekends, going to his house and cooking him dinner. For the first time in many
years, he and I were bonding. He had a girlfriend with “an ass like a donkey,” which he swore was a good thing. We went to the animal shelter together and I helped my dad choose a puppy to adopt—a little Chihuahua that we named Peanut. I’d never before felt this close to my father, who was in high spirits these days, even though he wasn’t eating a lot and had lost some weight. He acted like the weight loss was because he was so busy, and gave me money to buy him a whole new wardrobe because he couldn’t fit into his old clothes anymore. Upon my insistence, he went to the doctor and afterward called to tell me what the physician had said. When I heard the words “esophageal cancer” I just flipped.
No, not you too, Daddy—you can’t be sick too.
My dad backtracked. “Well, they didn’t say that I
had
the cancer; they’re just running some tests.” That weekend he got so sick he had to go to the hospital.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” I asked him, by his bedside.

“Oh, yes, they’re sending me home tomorrow because I’m fine,” he replied.

They did send him home in the morning—but not because he was better. Because there was nothing they could do. The cancer was too advanced. I went to his house and he didn’t look good. He was only eating ice chips. I knew something was very wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me the truth. He had told everyone in the family that he didn’t want me or my brother to know that he was dying, even though he was puking up his insides all day and night, and was unable to eat any food or drink any water. My dad ended up losing nearly forty pounds in a week.

One night, at around 4
A.M.
, I woke up. Crying and shaking, I knocked on my mom’s door. “Mom, I can’t sleep. I just don’t understand what’s wrong with Dad.” She sighed. “Okay, Bobbie, you have to be strong, okay?” And she told me that my father was dying.

The next day, my dad confirmed it. He told my brother and me that he loved us, but it looked like he was going to have to say good-bye soon. “It’s okay, Bobbie, don’t cry. These ice chips don’t taste so bad, you know. Kinda like steak, if you use your imagination.” He was in constant pain, and I wanted him to go back to the hospital. But he refused, stubborn old coot. He hated doctors. I had to think of a way to get him back to the hospital, so I told him that if his liver failed, he would almost certainly become mentally retarded. That convinced him to go—he was proud like that, and wanted to have all his marbles right up to the end.

I went back and forth from the hospital every day. Every time I saw him, I would break down in tears and he would yell at me and send me out of the room. My brother was at his bedside around the clock. Then one night at about 4
A.M.
, my brother called—our dad had passed away singing an old hymn, “I Have Found a Friend in Jesus.” Adam was holding his hand. My dad had never been religious until the last few years of his life. “We’re in the end-time, BJ,” he’d say, and hand me pamphlets. “Okay, Dad, whatever,” I’d say.

I was a screaming basket case at my father’s memorial. When they projected photos of him on a screen, I howled like a beaten
dog. It was impossible for me to mourn my father in a quiet or dignified way. There was so much, too much, left unsaid. Mr. Earl had been dead exactly two weeks—two funerals in a fortnight. “Everyone is dying, Mom, we shouldn’t be here anymore,” Taylar said to me at the funeral, and I agreed. The next day, we flew back to L.A.

Hollywood is such an intoxicating place to live. Even small fishes in its big pond can feel bigger and more important than they ever were back home. Problem is, once you leave, there are plenty more minnows waiting to take your place, and by the time you return, it’s as though you never even existed. I had been gone a whole year and found myself back at ground zero, sober, and a stranger in the town I had called home for so many years.

My mom and I paid for Taylar to live with a school friend of hers while I figured out where I was going to go. I had a girlfriend who invited me to stay with her, but she kicked me out the first night, saying she needed her space. Bret Mazur kindly let me stay at his house for a few days. Then I went to a hotel, but I was already running out of money. I called Jesse Woodrow, a preacher I knew, feeling desperate. “I don’t know what to do,” I said, crying. He said he had a friend who had a spare bedroom and that I could stay there for three days, until her mother arrived for a visit. I showed up with my suitcase and
broke down. If I didn’t figure out a place to go, I would be homeless. For real this time.

The girl I was staying with was dating a guy called Chris Shinn, a talented rock singer who is the lead singer of Live and was once tapped to be lead singer of Blind Melon. He listened quietly to my woes. “You can come stay with me as long as you like, Bobbie, I have an extra bedroom,” he said. At that moment, I remembered that angels are real. I hadn’t known Chris five minutes, but he agreed to take me in. Taylar came the second night and we lived there with him for a year, rent-free, at his beautiful home in the Hollywood Hills while I got back on my feet (again). It was hard. I didn’t have a job. I was only getting $500 a month from Jani (far less than the child support arrangement we had agreed upon), and the house was a forty-minute drive from Taylar’s school—sometimes an hour or more if the horrible L.A. freeway traffic was bad. She was often late for school. But we made it work. I cooked, cleaned, and bought groceries, pitching in as best I could. And there was no funny business, ever, with Chris. He was a good friend and a generous and respectful roommate. But still, it wasn’t the best environment for my daughter. We were sharing an air mattress in a small guest bedroom, with an even smaller bathroom. We both knew she deserved better. As much as I had been itching to make it to Hollywood when I was her age, she could hardly wait to leave.