by Tommy Lee
“Okay, it’s cool,” I relented. “Have fun. I’ll talk to you when you get back.”
I hung up the phone, called two of my friends, and said, “Pack your bags. We are going to Cancún.”
I dialed American Airlines, booked a flight, and called her home from the plane the next day. “I’m on an airplane right now having cocktails,” I said to her machine. “And I’m coming to find your ass.” I bet she wished she’d never given me her home number.
Half an hour later, I checked my answering machine and there was a message from her. “You are out of your mind!” she yelled. “Don’t come down here. This is not a vacation. This is a work trip. Do not come down here!”
But it was too late. When I arrived, I called every hotel on the strip searching for her. The sixth hotel on my list was the Ritz-Carlton, and when they said there was a Pamela Anderson staying there, I practically wet myself with excitement. She wasn’t in the room, of course, so I left her a message or six asking if she wanted to meet for a drink that night.
Evidently, she wasn’t even going to return my call, she was so pissed. But her friends were on my side this time: They saw how hard I was working, and begged her: “Just go out with him for one drink. It couldn’t hurt.” Well, it did hurt, because four days later we were married.
I showed up in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in a tank top, ripped jeans, and tats hanging out everywhere. They refused to let me anywhere near the bar or the restaurant, so we decided to fuck that piece-of-shit hotel and go elsewhere. As I was letting her into the cab, I paused to look at her. And I never stopped looking.
We found a place called Señor Frog’s, which reeked of spilled beer and margarita vomit. We were both shy and embarrassed, especially after all the buildup leading to this first date, but as the night progressed Señor Frog’s turned into the Sanctuary, the magic returned without the Ecstasy, and the outside world melted away. She had that one drink she promised me, and that drink led to another drink, and that other drink led to some other drinks, and all those drinks combined led to her hotel bed. When we finally fell asleep, that was the first time the entire night that we stopped looking into each other’s eyes.
We hung out every fucking night after that. We went to clubs, to restaurants, to bars, to the beach, and all we did was stare at each other and kiss each other all night. Then we went home and made golden love. She was in the penthouse suite and the elevator opened directly into her room, where there was a pool and a waterfall, both of which we took advantage of.
I couldn’t believe that it was possible to feel so happy. It was stronger than any Ecstasy I had ever had: I was literally incapable of thinking a bad thought—about myself, about Mötley Crüe, about Vince. For a so-called bad boy, I was turning into a pansy. It felt like our hearts had been hotglued together. When she was working, I’d just sit in my hotel room like a dead man and wait for her to call so I could come back to life again. I even phoned my parents and thanked them for raising such a spoiled little brat who couldn’t handle not having something he wanted, because otherwise I never would have had the confidence to stalk Pamela like I did.
When her shoot ended, we decided to stay in Cancún two more days. That night at a disco called La Boom, I took off my pinky ring, put it on her finger, and asked her to marry me. She said yes, hugged me, and stuck her tongue down my throat. The next morning, we decided that we had been serious and asked the hotel to find someone to perform a marriage ceremony. We gave blood, sniffed out a marriage license, and were on the beach in our swim trunks getting married before the day was over. Instead of wedding bands, we went for something more permanent: Tattoos of each other’s names around our fingers.
The next morning, we boarded the plane to fly back to Los Angeles. The closer we came, the harder reality began to hit us. This was real. We were married.
“Um,” she asked me. “Where are we going? Do you want to go to your house or mine?”
“I’ve got a place in Malibu, right on the beach…”
“Okay, then we’re going to your house.”
The moment we walked off the plane at LAX, the shitstorm hit. The airport was swarming with fucking photographers. We fought our way to my car and drove to my place. I glanced up at the hill overlooking the house, and dudes with cameras were camped out everywhere. It was like we had gone from the total-freedom paradise of Cancún to this hellish prison of Hollywood Babylon. We hired a twenty-four-hour security guard, but we still couldn’t do shit without this lynch mob following us everywhere.
Things only got worse when Pamela called home to tell her family the news. Her mother fucking flipped out and told her to file for divorce immediately while her brother asked for my address so he could come over and personally kick my ass. They basically disinherited her and refused to recognize our marriage. In the meantime, Bobbie had left twenty messages. She had heard on the news that Pamela and I were married, and she was pissed. As far as she was concerned, we were still going out.
At the bottom of the hill where the Pacific Coast Highway meets Kanan-Dume Road, my eyes unclouded and I had a moment of clarity. I screeched to a halt in front of the World Gym, threw open the door, and unloaded the gun into the stop sign there. I was still pissed, but I wasn’t stupid like O.J. I wasn’t going to let Brandi destroy my life any more than she already had.
I sat down by the side of the road and started crying. I couldn’t take it anymore. She was destroying me, and she was destroying the children. This new piece of expensively bought information made it impossible to continue to tolerate her shopping sprees and meanness around the house. I had to get away from her. I wanted so badly for Brandi and I to be everything that my parents never were, but it was impossible when my relationship had crumbled from beneath me.
When I confronted Brandi and asked for a divorce, our relationship turned from marriage to war, and she left the house threatening to take from me everything I owned and loved. I never realized how lonely the mansion could be. Not only was I now living by myself fighting for my children in a custody battle, but I wasn’t speaking to my mother and I didn’t know if my father was alive or dead. As for my band, the only real support system I had my whole life, they were a mess: Every day in the studio trying to make Generation Swine felt like an episode of Dynasty, with everybody plotting behind each other’s backs.
After I showed an engineer friend a song I had written at the height of my depression called “Song to Slit Your Wrists By,” he insisted I get out of the house. He started begging me to go out with a friend of his from Pasadena. “She’s an awesome girl,” he promised.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not really into dating right now. I just want to try and get my kids back.”
“Nikki, you need to go out with someone. Snap out of it. She’s a nice girl. You’ll like her.”
I caved in and called her. She seemed nice enough, so I invited her out for some food. It was so out of character with how I used to meet girls before I was married, when all I had to do was lean against the Sheetrock of the Starwood and look cool. The drive to her place in Pasadena took an hour and a half. I arrived, opened the door, and, sure enough, the bitch was cockeyed. Just like Angie Saxon’s old roommate. She looked like a drunk Geena Davis. As soon as I entered her Shabby Chic house, I wanted to turn and flee. This was not my style at all.
But I had driven all the way there, and she looked so desperate and expectant. So I took her someplace suitably pathetic like Chili’s. She kept pounding scotches, while I sat there watching because there was no way I was going to drive all the way home drunk. The more she guzzled, the louder and more obnoxious she became. Normally, I would have been just as drunk and loud, but sober I didn’t know how to deal with it. I just cowered and sank deeper into my chair.
I took her back to her place, and she pulled me inside and asked if I wanted to watch TV. I made an excuse, but she sat me down and flipped on Fox anyway. “This is my favorite show,” she said. It was Cops.
I sat as far away
from her on the couch as I could. During a commercial, she scooted onto the middle cushion. After a few more minutes of silence, she asked, “Do you want anything?”
“Uh, I’ll have some water.”
When she returned from the kitchen, she sat even closer to me. I wanted to get out of there so badly that sweat started streaming down the sides of my face. She scooted closer. Finally, I spoke: “I have to go. I have a long drive.”
“You should stay and watch Cops,” she insisted. “This is a really good episode.”
“No, I really should be going. I have a long drive.”
I stood up and she jumped in front of me, all tall and cockeyed. I tried to walk around her, but she interposed herself between me and the door and puckered up her lips. I pulled back, but she only grew more aggressive. I needed to get out of there: a cockeyed Geena Davis was attacking me. I was going to kill my friend. I ran to my truck and peeled off, forgetting to even say good-bye or “I had fun, thanks.” A minute later, my cell phone rang. It was her. This was turning into a horror movie.
“Why’d you leave?” she asked.
“Well…”
“You can spend the night if you want. I will do anything you want. Anything.”
“No, I really can’t.”
“I will be your slave,” she said. “I will do you oh so right.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe some other time.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, you know. You’re, um, cockeyed.”
That was pretty much the extent of my blind-dating experience. I met a cockeyed Geena Davis, then I met a cockeyed Meg Ryan. But I slept with the cockeyed Meg Ryan.
Tommy had married Pamela Anderson, so he was feeling pretty high and mighty. “Dude, you gotta stop going out with those regular girls,” he told me. “You have to go out with somebody who understands you, who’s busy like you are, who goes through the kind of shit you do. You need someone famous. Look through a magazine: find someone interesting.”
I went to the newsstand and grabbed Details and Premiere. Drew Barrymore seemed kind of fun; Cindy Crawford was good arm candy; and Jenny McCarthy looked like a wild girl who could make me laugh in bed. I drew up a form letter and had Kovac fax a copy to each of their managers, oblivious to the fact that Jenny McCarthy was actually dating her manager. Not only did I not get a single response, but those letters would come back to haunt me.
While we were finishing the album in the studio, I saw a copy of Playboy sitting around with a photo of some Baywatch blonde in the back. I noticed that she was a pretty girl, but I didn’t think anything else about it. The next day, Tommy said, “Pam wants to introduce you to somebody.”
“Oh, no, who? Some cockeyed David Hasselhoff?”
“No, a girl she works with on Baywatch. And she’s hot, dude.”
I didn’t really want to go out with some narcissistic actress bimbo, so I tried to back out of it. Besides, Pamela never really liked me anyway, and when I tried to get her to make friends with Brandi, it was like mixing oil and water. However, Scott Humphrey intervened as usual and said that if I didn’t want to go on the date, he’d go. So I pulled seniority.
Cursing myself for giving in to another stupid blind date, I drove to the Baywatch set. I was standing in the background watching them film a scene around the lifeguard tower when a woman walked on set with beautiful blond hair and a flowered sarong. It was the woman I had seen in Playboy. “That’s her, dude,” Tommy nudged me.
“No way. That girl would never go out with me.” I pictured her being bored as I waffled through dinner about the work we were doing on Generation Swine. I was sure I’d get shot down, and I contemplated sneaking away to save myself the embarrassment. She was too wholesome and all-American for a dirty fucker like me.
After the shoot, I walked down the long dirt road to the beach and met her halfway, where Pam introduced us. Her name was Donna, and she couldn’t have been any less excited to meet me. She didn’t even look at me. She just nodded and walked to her trailer. I guess the last thing she wanted to do was get involved with a tattooed heroin-shooting womanizer with three kids who was clearly still on the rebound from a messy marriage.
I went back to Pam’s trailer and waited, wondering if it wasn’t too late to make my escape. Donna was clearly thinking the same thing, because she walked inside and said, “You know what? I can’t go. I don’t have anything to wear.”
All Donna had was a long, loose-fitting pajama top that she had worn to work. “Just wear that,” I said. “That’s fine.” She gave me a dirty look, left the trailer, and came back ten minutes later in the pajamas.
“Fine,” she said. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”
The blind date was already a disaster. Tommy and Pam led the way to the Dragonfly in their Suburban. I followed in my Suburban, and Donna brought up the rear in her Pathfinder. It was a stereotypical L.A. date—conducted by motorcade. I kept making sudden turns and racing through yellow lights, hoping she’d get lost. By the time we reached the Dragonfly, I couldn’t see her in the rearview mirror anymore. I was safe. But a minute after I got out of my car, she pulled up behind me. I was stuck.
We hung out on the patio and started talking. Afterward, we went to a club where everyone was fucked up and dancing. But we stayed sober and talked in a corner about music and about our kids. I was actually enjoying myself.
Around midnight, I drove her to her car. I was running out of things to say, so I told her about my house and the swimming pool I was building.
“Oh really, a pool?” she yawned, feigning interest.
“Yeah, and it’s going to be shaped like a pussy. I’ve always wanted a pussy-shaped swimming pool, so I can just … oh, never mind.”
She rolled her eyes, and I saw any chance that I might ever have with her fly out the window. I dropped her off at her car and was so embarrassed I didn’t even try to kiss her.
Back at my big, isolated house, however, I felt so lonely and empty that I called her. I wanted to spend some more time with her and see if she was really as cool as I thought. We made a date to go to a restaurant in Malibu called Bamboo the next night.
That morning, I took my kids to the Malibu Fair, where I ran into Tommy and Pamela. Pamela was carrying their son Brandon, and her face was red with anger. Tommy was drunk off his ass trailing behind her, and she was clearly pissed. I told her I was going to see Donna again, and she gave me a patronizing pat on the head.
I dropped the kids off at Brandi’s, changed into my only set of presentable clothes, and picked Donna up. Over a messy noodle dinner at Bamboo, I started having these feelings that were either genuine love or just rebound obsession. I wasn’t sure, especially after I had fallen for Brandi so quickly and so wrongly. I was too scared to look at Donna, because it made me nervous just seeing how beautiful she was. When she went to the bathroom, guys came up to the table to congratulate me for being with someone so hot. Twelve years ago, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But marriage had drained away all my self-esteem.
Unlike my cockeyed dates, with Donna, I wanted to take her out to the beach and talk to her all night. We had so much in common: We were both from small towns, we both loved children, and she was regarded by the world as this Baywatch sex symbol, while I guess I was seen as the same in rock and roll. But in our hearts we both knew that we were just nerds, total fucking high-school losers who had put on a good act and gotten lucky. Finally, I said to Donna, “Listen, I live just around the corner. Do you want to go to my house? I have some wine, we can kick back, and I can show you some lovely etchings of the pussy-shaped pool I’m building.”
“Okay, if it’s close,” she said.
“Sure, it’ll just take a minute.”
It was twenty-five miles away, and I knew it. She followed me in her Pathfinder up the Pacific Coast Highway to Kanan-Dume. As we wound our way into the hills, she signaled for me to pull over. “How far are we going?” she asked, exasperated.
“We’re almost the
re.”
I led her all the way through Westlake Village and North Ranch, hoping she wouldn’t get fed up and just turn around. Finally, we pulled into my driveway.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked when she saw my Richie Rich mansion.
She came in, sat on the ten-thousand-dollar couch Brandi made me buy, and started drinking wine. I was too speechless to drink: I couldn’t believe this beautiful girl was sitting on my couch in this house that I only associated with marriage, children, and the worst studio experience of my life. It seemed so wrong, yet I was enjoying it so much. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t even know where or how to begin because I hadn’t done it in so long. I was such a loser, a Frank Feranna Jr. Finally, like a true nerd, I asked, “Can I hug you?”
She said I could, so I melted into her for five minutes. I buried my head in her blond hair and just lost myself like some kind of old, lecherous, sentimental fool inhaling the aroma of an eighteen-year-old for the first time in half a century.
She had polished off most of the wine, so I suggested that she stay the night. Too nervous that she’d think I had the wrong intention, I quickly said I’d sleep in my bedroom and she could have the guest room. I walked her to the spare room and, before I could leave, she pulled me down onto the bed. Sober, I was able to enjoy every second and every caress. As we rolled around together, I was going out of my mind with lust. I probably had all the subtlety of a dog humping a doorknob. It had been such a long time since I was last pressed against a beautiful woman I actually liked and respected. I wanted to fuck her so badly, but I was so turned on I knew it would only last a second. Then she’d hate me because I’d be the lamest fuck of her life.
“I have to go to my room,” I told her.
“No,” she whispered. “Stay.”
I was exhausted because I wasn’t used to staying up so late, but I was so excited to be lying next to this panty-clad bombshell that it took me hours to fall asleep. When I awoke, the sun was rising and she was gone.