Drinking and Tweeting (5 page)

Someone told me that I should wait for him to file first, so that he would incur the cost. That was the stupidest advice ever. When it comes to divorce, the $2,000 charge that the city charges you to process the divorce isn’t even a blip on the radar. After nearly two years of back-and-forth, Eddie’s and my divorce cost north of $250,000. I know that doesn’t seem like a costly divorce to certain people in LA, but to us, it was beyond substantial. We had been living beyond our means for years—and despite the occasional hints from his mother (“Brandi, you guys are spending too much money,” she would say), I was pretty much in the dark about it. I figured she wanted us to be frugal since the downturn in
the economy, but Eddie never stopped buying expensive toys or planning luxurious vacations. Toward the end of our marriage, he even paid cash for a new Harley-Davidson. I went with him to the bank and saw him pull out the wad of cash. So I didn’t worry too much about it. That wasn’t my job in the relationship. I had a hot dinner served on time every night, and I looked great on his arm. That was my role.

Not until we started the divorce did I realize how truly broke we were. Yet another opportunity for Eddie to smack me in the face with something I was so unprepared for.

I grew up in a modest home with a modest household income. My father was the local pot dealer, and my mom was a hippie who rarely wore a bra. I was the middle child between my older sister, Tricia, and my younger brother, Michael (both of whom still live in Northern California). My mother breast-fed us far too long, and my father worked three jobs, besides the pot dealing, so we rarely saw him. I know it sounds awful—“my father, the drug dealer”—but it truly was a means to an end. He sold pot because it was an extra income that could help to send all three of us to a private Lutheran school outside
our neighborhood. We lived in a terrible neighborhood, and the public schools around us were dangerous.

Sure, I became used to the fancy house and the nice things, but I was never afraid of living a modest life again, if we needed to. I would have scaled back enormously, had I known how much we were hurting, and tried to pitch in any way I could. It was a marriage, a partnership. We lived in Los Angeles, surrounded by some of the wealthiest people in the world, but Eddie and I were never truly rich. We were ghetto rich—we had the nice cars, the nice house, and the nice jewels, but we probably had a second and a third mortgage. We were living paycheck to paycheck, with little savings.

You can imagine the insane frustration I felt when it cost me a quarter of a million dollars just to divorce a man who was parking his Harley in every available spot in town. In hindsight, I wish I’d had the emotional satisfaction of filing first, so I wouldn’t ever have to hear again that it was Eddie who left me. In actuality, I ended things. He would have come back if I let him, but that wasn’t an option. I would never be able to look at him the same way again.

The divorce would probably have cost us less than
50 percent of what it did if we had chosen a mediator, but what did Eddie care? He had a sugar mama now. He was angry, and he always had to win.

After the news came out that Eddie and LeAnn were having an affair, gossip reporters bombarded me hoping to score some outrageous quotes (and, boy, did they eventually get some juicy one-liners from me). I have no idea how they figured out my cell phone number, but the calls were coming morning, noon, and night. And they weren’t harassing just me, they were going after my friends and family, too. During the early stages of the media chaos, I kept quiet, because Eddie and I were trying to make things work. We signed up for couples therapy before news of his second affair, with the cocktail waitress, made headlines. (Word to the wise: if you need to see a couples therapist, your marriage is probably already over.) He even bought me a stripper pole for our anniversary. (Looking back, I see that was probably a pretty big red flag.) I didn’t realize that the entire time we were in therapy and trying to save our marriage, he was still seeing LeAnn.

Once photos surfaced of Eddie and LeAnn on motorcycles in Malibu, I just lost my shit. The same afternoon
those pictures were taken, the
In Touch
magazine photos of Eddie and Sheena the cocktail waitress (also known by me as his Tuesday-night slut) were circulating online and brought to my attention. In his defense, he did tell me that he was playing poker every Tuesday night. Silly me, I thought he was playing a card game. I didn’t realize that he was actually playing “poke her.” I guess it’s my fault for not asking him to spell it?

When I saw the Sheena photos, I immediately packed a bag and announced to Eddie that I was moving into the Beverly Hills Hotel. He begged me not to go, but I was determined to make my point and have him watch me walk away. Apparently, as soon as I hit the door, he was off to see LeAnn. I thought I was going to teach him a lesson; instead I learned that I just sent him right into her arms. But I guess he was headed that way, anyway.

N
o one ever tells you about the nitty-gritty of divorce. For instance, I never imagined my husband and me walking through our shared home of three years with yellow legal pads, picking apart what each of us would be keeping. It was one of the most surreal experiences of
my life: each of us flanked by our lawyers, we went from room to room, slowly and meticulously deconstructing the life we had spent years building together. While we agreed on many items, Eddie was going to fight me for some of the big-ticket items, including the twelve-person Tiffany dinnerware set we received as a wedding gift from my parents. Like, for real, dude? You want to split our china? He did. And he got half. So if anyone is interested, I can do a posh dinner party for six on Tiffany china. I lost the crystal glassware, though, so it’s BYOC (bring your own cup) at my next dinner party . . . for six.

During further negotiations, I sat across the table from him in one of those big, cold conference rooms. It was so surreal to me, because I was able to see a side of him that I never recognized before. He was a coward. In retrospect, I’m surprised he even had the fucking balls to show up. He’s hidden behind lies and half-truths his entire life, so anytime he’s faced with brutal honesty, he runs. It’s just his nature. And part of me was all too happy to insult him in front of his fancy-pants lawyer.

We fought over the motorcycles, the condo, the boat, and the electronics . . . everything. I even brought in a forensic accountant to dissect his credit-card bills to dig
up what he purchased for his mistress with our joint funds. It cost me $12,000 to find out that he bought his Tuesday-night girlfriend some diamond earrings and paid the rent for her Hollywood apartment. The irony? I didn’t even get any money for it, and I still had to pay the bill. But I was angry and hurt, so I was up for the fight. It became the ultimate pissing match. I spent double what I ended up getting as the settlement, just because I wanted to fight with him, and I didn’t want him to win.

Eddie even fought me for the Bronco my father had given us to refurbish. That’s where I nearly lost it. I was planning to give it back to my father. When I told my dad that Eddie was fighting me for it, he called Eddie to tell him that it was a gift meant for me. Eddie might be a total loser, but he just loves to win.

Determining ownership of the Bronco was one of the final sticking points in our divorce. During one of our last meetings, the lawyers suggested that we each write down on a piece of paper how much we were willing to spend to buy the Bronco off the other person. The person with the highest number would pay that to the other party out of the settlement. We both agreed.

I knew Eddie wanted to win and that he would pay a premium to get the car. I would have loved to get it, but I couldn’t afford to lose that money out of our settlement. I had no income and decided that I needed to let it go, but Eddie didn’t have to know that. So, I decided to try to milk some money out of the bastard. With my pen, I pretended to write a large, long figure on my piece of paper. I noticed Eddie doing the same. We both pushed our papers to the middle of the table, and our lawyers flipped them around. Eddie was willing to pay $65,000. I was willing to pay $1. Eddie pretended that he didn’t care that I just screwed him out of $65,000, but I knew it royally pissed him off. What could be sweeter? I got paid a whole lot of money to irritate my ex-husband.

But in the same vein, did I want half of his fancy tools? You bet your ass. Did I try to snake half of his watch collection? Obviously. But Eddie was smart—smarter than he looks, anyway. I remember watching him carry the watch case filled with his extravagant watch collection (including three Rolexes, three Panerais, two Franck Mullers, and a Cartier that I had given him, totaling well over $100,000) out of the house the very day news of his affair had come out, along with many of the
expensive electronics. This was the love of my life and our marriage was over, so naturally that sent me into a tailspin. It was clear to me then that this was going to get ugly.

Luckily, I was able to keep my wedding rings: a three-carat, prong-set wedding band and my four-and-a-quarter-carat, princess-cut, center-stone engagement ring. Today it’s probably worth upward of $70,000 and could probably have saved me a lot of financial hardship in the beginning had I decided to sell it, but I just couldn’t. Instead, I locked the ring away in a safe-deposit box, so that one day my Mason or Jake can have it. People often ask me if I think it would be bad luck for my son and future daughter-in-law to use a ring that was the symbol of my failed marriage. My answer? Fuck off. How could a thirteen-year relationship that brought into this world two of its most beautiful people be considered a failure or bad luck? I don’t regret being Eddie’s wife, and I don’t regret the life we built together. I just regret encouraging him to do that made-for-TV movie.

After the division of the assets came the really fun part, the child- and spousal-support negotiations. This, the lengthiest part of the divorce, lasted over a year. We
couldn’t agree on anything, and our lawyers seemed to encourage the fighting (which translated into more billable hours for them). I wanted full custody of my kids, but Eddie was fighting me for half. I know Eddie loves our children, but while we were married, he was never around. He just wasn’t a hands-on dad back then. I doubt he even knew how to bathe them or get them ready for bed.

Eventually, after months and months of back-and-forth on who would get what, I backed down—as I always did with him. It just wasn’t worth it anymore, and it was draining the life out of me. I was exhausted, depressed, and drinking too much for my own good. I was in a bad place. It simply wasn’t healthy to exert this much time and energy on hate and revenge. The continued fighting was consuming me, fucking me up. I concluded that I kept fighting with him to keep him in my life in some capacity. In my head, all of our arguments came from a place of passion. I realized that I was holding on to something that wasn’t there anymore. I guess I hadn’t been ready to completely let him go. But it was finally time.

Nearly a year and a half after I got that Wednesday-morning
call, I was free. Strangely, I don’t even remember the exact date, but it was in late September 2010. My lawyer called to tell me the papers were ready to be signed, so I drove to her office and signed them. It was surprisingly anticlimactic. Eight years of marriage became null and void with a single signature, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t even tell any of my friends or family—not because I was hiding it, but because it didn’t even register to me that it was something I ought to share. It was a nonevent in my eyes. My marriage had been over for quite some time. I was in a new relationship, and Eddie was already living with LeAnn and would soon be married again, so I didn’t see the point in announcing, “I’m officially divorced, peeps!” Instead, I went on with my day.
My
day. I no longer was the dutiful wife. My life, however messy and dysfunctional, was now mine.

brandi’s babble

Next time, do yourself a favor and get a prenup.

CHAPTER THREE

The Third Kind of Job

T
o this point in my life, the only jobs I’d ever had to worry about were boob jobs and blow jobs—anything beyond that was simply not in my wheelhouse.

During my senior year of high school, a modeling agent from San Francisco had approached me while I was wandering around the local mall looking for something fab from Contempo Casuals for the weekend ahead. I know what you’re thinking: Aren’t these the kind of scams that trick idealistic teenage girls into doing soft-core porn? Yep, but mine was totally legit, I swear. The following week, my boyfriend drove me into San Francisco to meet with Al, an agent at Look Models, to discuss my opportunities. Even as graduation
quickly approached, I didn’t put much thought into what I would do next. I figured I would move to San Francisco (or “the city,” as us Sacramento folk called it), get a high-paying serving job at some hip restaurant that only catered to the coolest of people, and spend the next few years partying. Hey, it seemed plausible at the time.

I never had dreams of going to college, joining a sorority, and earning some degree in psychology, social science, or medicine—that all sounded as about appealing to me as virgin sex.

So when this modeling agent expressed interest in me, I just figured modeling was what I was meant to be doing. We sat in his office on O’Farrell Street near Union Square, the heart of the city’s fashion district, where he gave me a punch list of self-improvements to make over the next few months. He told me to come back to see him only if they were all satisfied. I consider it my first-ever job training.

1. Immediately color my hair a less offensive shade of blond.

2. Break up with my longest relationship to date: an eye-shadow set of shimmery pink and light blue.