Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (14 page)

Tom and I were traveling again, this time to Chicago for the final two shows of Van Halen’s North American tour. Wolfie had had a great if not life-changing time performing with the band. But I was ready to get my son back after nine months of letting him travel across the country with a bunch of veteran rockers.

Tom and I had his son Dominic with us on the plane. After the concerts, the two of them were going to visit Tom’s parents in Ohio.

I looked at Dom and thought back to when Wolfie was ten years old. As much as I missed my son being that age, I was in a better place now than I was back then. I had come a long way since the start of the tour, too. Actually, both Wolfie and I had changed since that day before the tour started when I watched him walk out the front door and wave goodbye, promising me that he would be good and call regularly, while I worried whether I had packed him
enough socks and underwear. Now he had a serious girlfriend, a business manager, and dozens of stories that let me know he had grown up.

Not that he was a paragon of maturity. A few weeks earlier, Wolfie had called from his Charlottesville hotel room to tell me that he and Matt were throwing fruit from a gift basket out the hotel room window.

“Why are you telling me this?” I’d asked.

“Ma, I want you to hear me having fun,” he’d said.

Wonderful, I thought. He’s trying to be like his father. I will be able to tell this story with such pride the next time I get together with the ladies in my book club and everyone boasts of their children’s latest accomplishments.

But, in fact, he did give me reason to boast. A few days later, I received a call from Tom’s seventy-nine-year-old mother, Helen, who had gone with Tom and other family members to see Van Halen in Cleveland. Other than a Seals & Crofts show in the 1970s, it was her first rock concert, and she wanted me to know that Wolfie had been a perfect host—“a very good boy,” was how she put it—which was music to my ears.

What she didn’t tell me was that she had stood right in front of Wolfie the entire show, all five-foot-two and 110 pounds of her, at the lip of the stage, screaming, “Hi, Wolfie! Hi, Wolfie!” He waved, threw her a guitar pick, and said, “Hi, Mrs. V.” She kept screaming at him, “Hi, Wolfie.” Finally, he knelt down—and mind you, this was during the show—and said, “Mrs. V, I can see you.”

After landing in Chicago, Tom, Dominic, and I went straight to the hotel and met up with Wolfie, who asked if we liked our room. He was being sarcastic because I had insisted that Tom and I get one of the bedrooms in his two-bedroom suite. Apparently he
was smarting over that. Ordinarily his road buddy, Matt, took the second bedroom. But I wanted family time while we were in town.

Wolfie was still asking what was wrong with a nice suite down the hall. I gave him credit. But I told him what was wrong. I was his mother.

“But that’s not the way we usually do it,” he said.

“I’m not usually on the road with you,” I replied. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it fun.”

He groaned that it wouldn’t be like it was with Matt. I explained that it wasn’t supposed to be. Trying to lighten the mood, I offered to walk around the suite in boxers if it helped. That just got me a dirty look. I eventually realized that I couldn’t waltz in and impose myself just because I needed a fix of family time. Plus we weren’t Wolfie’s only visitors. He had also flown his girlfriend in for the final show, and he wanted to spend time alone with her, too.

“Where’s Dom going to sleep?” he asked.

“On the fold-out sofa in front of your room,” I chimed, much more casually than I had imagined delivering that news.

Wolfie thought about it for a second and then said, “Okay.”

A few hours later, we were at the arena, all of us crammed into his dressing room. Wolfie showed incredible patience as I fussed with his hair, but he drew the line when I suggested all of us have a light dinner together and then play Euchre until the show. He explained that he had a pre-show routine. He also wanted to deal with an issue he was having with his bass. Then he took Liv’s hand and they walked down the corridor, leaving Tom and me, the two old farts, with nothing to do but stare at each other as Dom and Alex Van Halen’s son, Malcolm, played video games.

I shrugged apologetically. I’d forgotten that Wolfie had a job to do.

“Who allowed him to grow up?” I asked.

Tom put his arm around me and said, “You did, baby.”

Later, we were still hanging out in Wolfie’s dressing room when I noticed that the comfortable sofa that had been part of his dressing room setup on all the previous dates was no longer part of the décor. When I asked where it had gone, Wolfie gritted his teeth and said, “Dad and Janie took it.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“It’s not fair,” he said.

“Dude, it’s not about fair,” I said. “It’s about your dad.”

I noticed Liv give Wolfie a soothing love pat as I turned to Tom with my take on the relocated sofa. I interpreted it as a good thing, a sign that Janie was trying to get Ed to relax before shows, and therefore wanted the sofa in case he wanted to lie down or cozy up with her and talk. Maybe she was exerting more influence since their recent engagement. After putting the ring on her finger, Ed had come to my house and told me the news so I would know before reading it on the Internet.

As word spread, a couple of people asked me how I felt about the news. If they thought I would be upset, they didn’t know me. I was happy for both Ed and Janie, a publicist who had survived numerous ups and downs with Ed. From what I had seen throughout the last year, she truly loved him. And Ed loved her.

These days, Ed appeared to be doing quite well. I saw him through Wolfie’s open dressing room door. He had either recently arrived at the arena or just come out of his dressing room. He was pacing the hallway with his guitar, getting into the zone, that place he retreated to in order to get ready to perform.

Like many artists, Ed spent much of his time in his head. The youngest of two sons of Dutch musician Jan Van Halen and his wife, Eugenia, he was a music prodigy who played piano as a child and won numerous competitions. His parents had a volatile, sometimes violent marriage, and early on Ed escaped into his music. He learned the drums, but switched to guitar when his brother Alex showed more promise, and by his early teens he spent practically all of his waking hours practicing guitar—as he himself has said, sitting on the edge of his bed, his guitar slung over his shoulder, with tall cans of Schlitz malt beer and cigarettes nearby.

His life continued pretty much the same once he became an adult. Even as his bedrooms changed, stardom allowed him to stay in the comfort and familiarity of that dysfunctional bubble. In fact, he was rewarded for prolonging his adolescence—and, in my opinion, he suffered for it more than anyone acknowledged, including he himself.

When I thought back to Ed during our marriage, especially the first half, I pictured a sweet, sensitive, extraordinarily talented young man who, whether in the studio or with me, spent much of his energy battling demons. He seemed to continue battling them through the early part of this tour. I was happy to see him out in the hallway looking much better.

We were in some ways two peas from the same pod. He knew my imperfections, a long list of them, as well as anybody. The difference was I had worked on shedding my unhappiness and making my life healthier. I hoped it had made an impression on him, and maybe even inspired him in some way not only to get his shit together at age fifty-three but also to discover that he was a much better man than he let himself believe.

A short time later, I saw him in the hallway again, this time holding Janie’s hand. He looked sweet. I hoped she could lead him to places I hadn’t been able to. I also hoped he would let her.

Meanwhile, Wolfie and Liv returned to his dressing room. I sensed he wanted some alone time with her before the show. All of a sudden the room felt crowded, more so than when all four of us had shared it an hour earlier. Tom and I and the kids excused ourselves to take a walk. Basically, we’d been booted. Pretending to be upset, I took Tom’s hand and grumbled, “It’s not fair.”

Laughing, he asked, “Where have I heard that before?”

During the show, Tom walked around with the little boys, Dominic and Malcolm. They ended up in front of the stage as Alex went into his drum solo. Tom hoisted Malcolm up on his shoulders so he could see his dad.

I was perched on the side of the stage in almost the same place I had stood when I was married to Ed. Only now, all these years later, I was on the other side of the stage, sharing the space with Wolfie’s girlfriend, and enjoying how thoroughly happy both Wolfie and Ed looked playing with each other. I smiled. It was easy to forget how personal the music is to Ed, and it gave me a warm feeling to see the two of them sharing it.

As Alex continued to wail on the drums, Wolfie came over to visit me and Liv (or vice versa). He started to tell Liv something and I saw him get agitated. When I asked if something was wrong, he said some guy up front was “drunk off his ass” and distracting him.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He keeps flipping me off,” Wolfie said.

My mother-hen instinct took over and I said, “I’ll take care of it.”

“No, mom!” he said. “Please! It’s happened before. I’ll get through it.”

Sure he would. But I didn’t know if I could.

“I just want to tell him to not be mean to you,” I said.

“No you aren’t,” Wolfie said. “I know you. I can see the headline in the tabloids: ‘Valerie Bertinelli Goes Apeshit at Van Halen Concert. Attacks Fan.’ It will not look good.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, knowing what I was going to do anyway.

As soon as Wolfie went back onstage, I went back to my place out front and began looking for the guy. Sure enough, I saw some guy drunk off his ass, flipping him off. He was probably four people away from me. I made eye contact with his girlfriend, who nudged him. Suddenly, I was locking eyes with this a-hole. He began to grin, but I raised my right index finger and shook it at him. I shook the smile off his face, too. I’m sure Wolfie saw me from the stage. So did security, who took the guy away before I could get into it with him.

I rode back to the hotel with Wolfie, Liv, Tom, and Dominic. As they discussed the show, I gazed out the window and saw Ed and Janie’s limo in the lane next to us and beyond them the twinkling bright lights of downtown Chicago. I was in a reflective mood, thinking about the long journey that had brought all of us to this point where everyone was in a good place—better in fact than we had been a year earlier.

As we sped along the freeway, I had no complaints. I wondered if this were a state of grace, a moment of answered prayer when God reached His hand down to me and said, “Hey, feel this. This is what I’m talking about. This is your cappelletti soup.”

We woke up the next day to extraordinary weather. We had been invited to go out on Lake Michigan. The lovely man who
owned the limousine service the band uses took all of us for a day-long cruise on his boat. Not expecting to need a bathing suit in Chicago, I picked up a pair of shorts and a tank top at the marina, something I never would have done a few years earlier. I would have suffered in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt.

As we motored around the lake, I saw a water ski line and inner tube in the back of the boat and suggested we try it. Wolfie and I were the only ones who were game. He wanted to go first. He climbed down onto the back and stuck his leg in the water. It was ice cold. He immediately hoisted himself back on deck and said, “No way.”

A moment later, I jumped down, grabbed the inner tube, stuck my butt in the center and flew backwards into the chilly blue water. Tom let out a whoop and I heard Wolfie shout, “Mom, you are crazy!”