His Forbidden Bride: 50 Loving States, West Virginia (16 page)

D
espite my years
spent in the reality show business, I’ve never understood the term “all hell broke loose” until now. On my show, the fights are pre-planned and sometimes even coordinated for the best camera angles and effects.

But Dixon jumps on the older man so fast, the first punch is being thrown before I can even think to stop him. His uncle takes the punch and throws one of his own, which Dixon narrowly avoids by canting to the side. But then Mason spins him around, one meaty fist already raised…

“No!” I scream at Mason. “Please don’t hurt him.”

Thank God for Colin. He jumps Mason from behind, sending the biker stumbling backwards.

“Run!” I yell at Dixon.

But instead of running, Dixon follows Mason’s backward stumble. Seemingly hell bent on punching him out, too.

The doctor in me is about to have a brain aneurysm at the thought of the many relapses and injuries Dixon’s setting himself up for. But my heart un-seizes when I hear the sound of running feet….

Only to curdle right back up when I see who it is: My dad, Sandy, and a camera guy, probably dragged out of the VMH shindig where he was supposed to be shooting advanced footage for the Vemmie’s after-party news story.

Dad stops for a second to assess the situation, then faster than you can say “ratings gold,” he’s in the mix, too. Showing his true street nature and throwing punches right alongside Dixon, like a man who’s been leashed up in his gilded cage for way too long.

“Stop it! Stop it!” I scream. The knowledge that I could hurt the baby is the only thing keeping me out of the fray.

In a burst of strategy, I get in front of the camera, blocking the shot. “He has a head injury. Please stop! Please stop rolling and make them stop fighting!!!” I scream loud enough for the entire legal department of VMH to hear in their matching Brentwood homes.

Me breaking the fourth wall and pretty much ruining the take is Sandy’s cue to act like an actual human. “Okay, that’s enough, Curtis!” she informs my father. “We need Woods out of this fight.”

Like an impeccably trained actor, C-Mello immediately stops fighting and starts yelling. “Okay, okay shut this shit down right now. This supposed to be a celebration. What the fuck you all doing fighting up in here?”

Dixon’s uncle, whose nose is pretty much bleeding and broken, replies, “You think I’m going to listen to you? You ain’t nothing but a…” And that’s when Uncle Fred drops another N-bomb on my dad.

Having grown up on the mean but mostly black streets of Compton, I realize at that moment that the well-known rapper may not have ever been called that particular word in his life by an actual white Southerner.

Dad squints at the bloody nosed biker and his voice drops about two registers deeper than I’ve heard it in over a decade as he asks, “
What
did you just call me?”

“He has amnesia!” I yell, running to get between the two factions before they can start fighting again. “He has amnesia. I don’t know what you all are so mad at him about, but whatever it is, he doesn’t remember. So please stop this before you seriously hurt him. Please!”

Mason, who was just gearing up to throw another punch at Dixon now that Colin is finally off his back, lets his arm drop.

“What?” he asks.

I would have done anything to not have this go down with cameras rolling. Anything. But my reality life and my real life have finally collided and I find myself with no choice but to step forward and explain, on camera, for all of America to hear: “I don’t know who you are, but whatever you believe this man has done to you is a mistake. He didn’t steal your money. He has amnesia. He presented in my hospital a few months ago with no recollection of who he is or why he was in West Virginia.”

Mason steps back, both fist uncurling as he asks, “That true, D. You don’t got any memory of me? Or you?”

Dixon just looks at him, fists still raised. But he admits, “You’re old.”

Before Mason can get offended like Colin did, I explain, “That’s his way of saying he knows you have a place in his past, but he doesn’t remember who you are or what you mean to him. When we first met he called me new. In fact, everyone he’s met has been new up until tonight.”

“I bet. You’re real new,” Mason snarls at me. Then he turns back to Dixon. “Tell me you didn’t really marry her like we heard on the news.”

I peek over at Dixon. Considering how his family is taking this news, this might be a good time for him to confess that we’re not legally married, just promised.

But Dixon glares at his cousin, brow pulled low. “I don’t care what kind of kin you are to me. She’s my wife, and if you say another word against her, I promise I will end you.”

For a full second, Mason only stares back at him, mouth agape. Not with anger, I now realize, watching him watch Dixon, but with true confusion. As if Dixon has just said the most preposterous thing he’s ever heard.

“You cannot feel that way about her, D. You cannot stay with her,” he explains like Dixon is a slow child. “That is not an option for you.”

“Why, because you said so?” Dixon asks in a way that doesn’t leave much in the way of doubt about his unwillingness to do anything his cousin says.

Mason shakes his head. “No, dickweed! Because you’re the president of our motorcycle gang, the Southern Freedom Knights.”

Oh no,
I think,
he’s the leader of a gang
. And that’s all I’m thinking in the moment.

Forgive me. This is a lot to take in, following the chaos of the fight and all the jaw-dropping reveals. That Woods’ name is really Dixon. That he’s related by blood to one of biggest singers in country music. That he’s apparently the head of—if Mason is any indicator—a really gnarly, redneck motorcycle gang.

So maybe you can see why it takes so long for the other shoe to drop. Why I don’t get the implication of his and his cousin’s names until my dad says, “Wait a minute, you talking about that fucked up white supremacist gang?
Them
Southern Freedom Knights?”

“Yeah,
them
Southern Freedom Knights,” Dixon’s uncle answers without any embarrassment whatsoever. Then he turns his horrible gaze back to Dixon to say, “We don’t believe in race-mixing of any kind. In fact, the only way any of us would agree to be with one of her kind,” he jerks his head at me, “is if he had a goddamn case of amnesia.”

T
he world spins
.

Not because I’m pregnant.

This isn’t another fainting spell, but the kind of mental whiplash you get when a ride spinning so fast one way suddenly decides to go in the opposite direction. A sickening reversal from when John Doe kissed me in my apartment, and made every wish I wouldn’t have admitted to harboring—being known only as a doctor by somebody, being kissed for real, not for ratings, experiencing actual attraction for the very first time—come true.

Our story, the story I thought would be wrapped up with a happily ever after bow when we left for Seattle in two days, unravels as my world spins backwards. And this time, when the spinning stops, I’m not a doctor falling hard for an amnesia patient who needs my help, but a crazy reality star who has let the unthinkable into her heart. Into her womb…

“No,” I whisper, even as I look at him and see in his eyes that this concept is not new. That it is, in fact, old.

“Doc,” he whispers. Then stops, wincing as if something painful is happening inside his head. “I don’t know…I don’t understand. But I don’t care what they say, I love you and I want to be with you.”

Sandy has been a producer for too many years. She must have pulled out her phone and started researching as soon as Mason started talking, because she’s suddenly standing beside me. Silently shoving a phone into my hands, then quickly stepping back so the camera can get a clean reaction shot.

On her phone, Dixon is dressed in what my mother would call a Sunday Suit. He’s clean cut with the kind of neat, contoured pompadour one associates with upstanding Christian men. My mom would totally approve…

If he weren’t also waxing poetically and convincingly about subjects so vile, I drop the phone only a minute into it.

“What the fuck is this?” Dad says as I cover my mouth for fear I will throw up all over my evening gown.

“Oh my God…Oh my God…” I say. Still not understanding anything, but somehow getting everything. The mystery of who he is has finally been solved. In under two minutes of YouTube footage.

I look at Woods—no Dixon, as in the freaking
Mason Dixon
line. His name, and his cousin’s, and all the implications are suddenly as clear to me as a good-bye song in a musical.

The man standing in front of me is shaking his head like he doesn’t understand any of this. But the man on the fallen phone is steadily extolling his viewers to believe, as he and the Southern Knights of Freedom do, in the separation of races.

“That’s not me,” Dixon insists, his voice harsh with emotion. “He looks like me and he sounds like me. And what he’s saying—that’s old. I can feel that now. But he’s not me, Doc…”

He reaches out for me and I scream, “Don’t touch me! Oh my God, don’t touch me…!”

And though I’m the one screaming, the one who just found out the guy she fell in love with is the very well-spoken leader of a white supremacist motorcycle gang, he’s the one who looks like he’s about to cry. “Doc, no…you’ve got to listen to me. You’ve got to—”

“She don’t got to do nothing but get the hell out of here,” my father answers in my stead. “Sandy, cut them mother fucking cameras.”

“But this is a rating wonder bomb,” Sandy starts. “When the network sees this, they’ll renew your contracts for sure. You’ll be able to name your price—”

“I said cut them!” Dad yells at her, his face blazing with 100% real anger.

With a disgusted sound, Sandy gives the hand signal and the op lowers the camera.

“C’mon, baby,” Dad says, putting a protective arm around me and starting toward the door.

But Dixon gets in front of us. “No! She is my wife!” he says to my dad. “She is carrying my baby.”

“What!?!?” both Dad and Dixon’s uncle roar.

And fuck orders, the op raises the camera and starts rolling again.

Just in time to watch Dixon fall to his knees in front of me.

“What are you doing?” his uncle demands. “Get off your knees. We done told you how it is. How dare you defile yourself like this over a…!”

Yet another n-word drop, but I’m not sure Dixon even hears the hate his uncle is spewing, his eyes are so intense on me.

“Doc! Doc!” he implores desperately. “It’s still you and me. I still love you more than anything. I know this is scary. What I used to be is scary. But you’ve got to believe in me, in us.”

My stomach lurches. I’m torn between so many feelings. I don’t want to be on television anymore. I really, really don’t want to be anywhere near it. Dixon is a monster—a true monster by both belief and trade. And me…I’m the stupid, stupid woman who fell in love with him. Whose heart can’t help but squeeze at the desperate tone of his words, even though I completely understand who he is now.

Tears well up in my eyes, but this time I don’t let them fall.

I’m a reality star. I’m a doctor. And now it’s time to stop being a fool.

I uncover my mouth and pick the tattooed behemoth he was apparently named beside out of the small crowd. “Hold him back. Hold him back, or he’ll try to follow me.”

Then in a sweep of heavy evening gown, I head to the door without waiting for their responses.

But Mason, I can tell, is a very, very good soldier for his cause. I hear but don’t see him grab Dixon in some kind of chokehold clinch that makes his, “No, Doc! Doc! Doc!” come out strangled.

Yet Dixon still manages to yell after me. So loud, I can hear him begging me not to go, yelling how much I mean to him, how much he loves me. How that’s his baby I’m carrying.

“You two belong with me! We’re a family! You said you would be my family,” I hear him yell as I run for the elevators.

Then and long after the elevator doors have closed.

I
n the days
that follow what a few online sites dubbed the “Penthouse Showdown,” I’ve read enough to last me a century about Dixon Fairgood.

I now know that the Southern Freedom Knights are an organization so old, they started off on horseback and count themselves among the very first motorcycle “clubs” in the country, begun right after World War I. Dixon’s father was actually pretty low on the club’s totem pole, and by all accounts a reckless alcoholic who could barely hold down a job, even a criminal one. He never even made it onto the SFK’s board. But Dixon’s maternal grandfather was the club’s president, and his father’s brother was the club’s Vice President. They along with the rest of the board recognized something in Dixon from a very young age, and he’d basically been groomed to become the president after his grandfather .

Unlike my father who’s built an entire bragadocious rap career from a one-year stint selling drugs on the street, the Southern Freedom Knights are actually real-deal criminals. The Feds and the state of Tennessee have them under investigation for all types of shit: from selling meth to running guns.

Colin and Dixon’s father actually did a few stints in jail, but the authorities could never make anything stick.

In any case, Dixon Fairgood had been doing a much better job in his inherited position. No blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan babies to show for it by the age of twenty-eight, but that speech, which he’d made at a “Whites Right Rally” a few years back, with his grandfather’s encouragement had gone viral. And he’d apparently done a much better job than his grandfather of connecting and working with disparate supremacist gangs throughout the country. The SFK has been allegedly running their various lucrative underground businesses investigation-free ever since Dixon took over.

Colin might not have liked him very much, even going so far as to declare in one interview he didn’t consider him so much a brother as a man who’d been tragically brainwashed. However, there had been no doubt in either Dixon’s supporters or detractors minds that he’d eventually go on to be the most famous leader the SFK has ever had.

“Dangerously likeable” one left-leaning political blog described him. Handsome, well-spoken, and smart enough not to “adopt the look,” so he blended in with the rest of the populace. A few bloggers spoke of the possibility of him going the David Duke route and eventually running for public office. Sadly, in the rural part of Tennessee the club called home, it wouldn’t be hard for him to find enough like-minded people to garner a congressional seat.

And no wonder he’d loved the sweats I’d gotten him. According to the many pictures and reports swirling around on the internet, he’d only worn two uniforms: a full suit or full leathers.

Being able to walk around in sweats all day probably blew his mind.

My mama had warned her stadium congregations in more than one sermon that the devil came in many disguises, and in Dixon’s case, it had been a pair of hospital issue sweats.

This is bad. So bad.

So bad, Sola calls me shrieking, only to offer to abandon her Moscow Opera directorial debut after I explain what happened. So bad, she also offers to send in her extremely large husband to “handle” Dixon and the rest of his crew.

I turn down both offers, still too sad and broken-hearted to do anything more than lie in bed most days.

It’s so, so bad.

So bad, my mother, who never comes off tour, comes off tour. As does Curt Jr, even though he’s also on tour and has been calculatedly throwing Twitter into a tweeting frenzy with hints that he may debut a character based on his mother when both their tours collided—with cameras rolling of course—in Chicago that weekend.

But instead of making the reality TV ratings they need to get their contracts renewed, they both fly home to California. And I know it’s really bad when all three of them enter my gigantic bedroom without any film crew, although it was designed specifically for that purpose.

According to Sandy’s many texts, my story is scheduled for the front covers of no less than four major gossip magazines, and the network is even talking about pushing forward the season so they can take advantage of the press the Penthouse Showdown is getting.

But I know it’s epically bad when my family doesn’t say, “Wow, you done fucked up.” Or even, “That was some good TV you just made, Nitra!”

Instead, they all crawl into bed with me, like we used to pile in bed together back in the day.

When we still lived in Compton, because Mom’s fledgling church was there, and Dad was steady bent on keeping it real. On TV, we’re known for having cozy little conversations in our oversized beds, which are all big enough to fit five people. Conversations ranging from what happened that day to what we’d do if a motherfucking alien tried to come at us and we didn’t have a gun.

But that was just on the show. In real life, we often used to lie there. Quiet and exhausted and grateful to be part of such an accepting and loving family at the end of a struggle-filled day.

I know it’s bad, because instead of talking, we lie like we used to for a very, very long time. So long, I wonder if we’ll ever leave the relative safety of where we’ve ended up.

But eventually Dad says, “I talked with Sandy earlier today. Told her not to bother with contract renewal negotiations. We ain’t coming back.”

That’s an awfully big decision. One most men would have been expected to discuss with their family before making.

But my brother tucks a lock of his wig hair behind his ear before quietly agreeing, “Yeah, I think this is a real good place to end this shit show.”

However, I can’t let them do this. Can’t let them throw away the life they love just to protect me. “No, Dad, you don’t have to do that. This is all my fault. I can’t let you lose your renewal because of what I did. What I let happen.”

Dad looks at me like I’m crazy. Then he says, “Bitch, is you out your monkey-ass mind? This family 300! I don’t care what you bitches do or why you do it. We in this together. Ride or motherfuckin’ die.” But then Dad’s face saddens, as he seems to realize out loud, “That’s what I should have told you the first time you tried to quit the show.”

“That’s right!” Curt Jr. calls out from the other side of my parents, like we’re at church. “We family. No matter what happens, Nitra. And you know we have your back no matter what, just like you’ve always had ours.”

When he says this, I know he’s talking about when he came out as someone just south of transgender when he was twelve. The “unconditional acceptance on top of unending profanity” that made us such a fascinating docu-drama series hadn’t been as automatic as the public was led to believe. And my intractable bitchiness on all subjects from veganism to whether Grenada bought off the rack had come in most handy when wearing both my evangelical mother and my just plain homophobic father down on the subject of letting their only son walk his own path.

However, I truly believe Curt Jr. deserves to live his life however he sees fit. Me getting knocked up by a white supremacist biker? That’s on a whole ‘nother level.

There’s also the other elephant in the bed. My mother and her expectations.

“You can be as bitchy as you want, Nitra Mello. But not with our God. Not with your God!” she told me the one time I tried to float the idea of not going to church with her on TV. “Now get your narrow ass up them steps and get ready for church!”

Right now, I can’t help but feel like the biggest disappointment in the world to the woman who raised me to be both practical and responsible, to separate show life from spiritual life, to respect my body enough not to let anyone I don’t love into my temple.

This feels way beyond the string of one-night stands I engaged in with regular boys once the cameras were turned off.

And I turn over to look at her, so she knows I mean it from the bottom of my regretful heart when I say, “I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m so sorry.”

My mom doesn’t cry. She’s a shepherd of the Lord, here to do his work without getting distracted by the laments of life. But right now she looks as close to tears as I’ve ever seen her. And I get the shameful feeling she’s forcing herself to meet my gaze after my apology.

But then she pushes my weaved in locks out of my eyes, making me feel like I’m ten again. Like before the show, when she used to talk with me quietly, without “a very special moment” music playing over her words.

“You know where I draw the line when it comes to life,” she tells me, voice tight. But then her voice softens as she adds, “But no matter what you decide to do, your daddy’s right. I’m with
you
. I’ve got your back, too, baby. Because you’re my daughter, and I love you.”

“I know, Mommy,” I say, though I don’t think I really did. Not until now, in my darkest moment.

And though I haven’t trusted them for a very long time, though I’ve kept so many things to myself for fear of what they’d do with the news, I tell them now, “I’m keeping this baby.”

Mom expels a relieved sigh. She is a true shepherd of the Lord, but I think a drag queen son and a dead daughter is enough for one pastor to have to deal with in a lifetime. I appreciate her bravery and commitment, but I’m not going to add the abortion of her very first grandchild to her lists of woes. Also…

“I loved it before I found out what kind of evil its daddy really was, and I still love it now.”

“That’s right,” both my dad and brother co-sign as Mom nods in full agreement.

“I’m going to pray over you and this baby,” she promises me. “And after I come off this tour, me and Daddy will be coming right up there to you in Seattle. You won’t have to worry about a thing. Because we’re going to help you raise this baby right with the Lord and love.”

“And if my little nephew or niece shows any interest in high heels, you know I’ll be coming right on up there with a starter set!” my brother promises.

As my mother often does with my brother, she goes silent before making the very wise decision not to respond to his (most likely super true) declaration.

“The point is, it doesn’t matter who this baby’s daddy is. I hope you know that, pumpkin.”

I nod. Knowing but not quite agreeing. Because I know in my most secret of hearts I’m not just keeping it because I love it, but also because it’s the only thing I have left of the only man I’ve truly ever loved. A man who walked into Colin’s penthouse suite with me, but didn’t come out. The man whose ring I still haven’t managed to take off. Even though I know he’s not my real husband, could never be my true family after the things his real self has done and said about people like us. No matter how loudly he called after me that we were a family. That he loved me.

Now I let my real family hold me, making the greatest sacrifice they know how to make in order to keep me safe and sane.

Now I cry for all the stupid decisions I’ve made over the past two months—the ones that felt like falling in love.

And now the mom I thought had been left behind in Compton holds me as she says, “Ssshh! It’s going to be all right, baby. We’re going to get through this.”