The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  I rolled out of bed, put on my robe, and found her smoking a cigarette on a veranda overlooking the future site of my giant pussy pool. Her back was to me, and she was gazing out at the multimillion-dollar mansions of my neighbors. “What are you doing?” I asked as I stepped through the veranda door.

  She turned around startled and saw this ugly rock star in a robe coming out of a giant white-marble-filled house lit up by the rising sun. It looked like a scene from Scarface.

  “This is way too much for me to handle,” she said. “I’m out of here.”

  “You can’t leave, you can’t leave,” I begged.

  She grabbed the rest of her clothes and ran out to her car, with me in my robe offering her anything if she’d just stay. She peeled out of the driveway and I stood there alone, knowing exactly how the cockeyed Geena Davis must have felt when I left. I was a monster who wine had somehow made attractive to this girl for about two hours. I sat down on the bed and started writing: “She’s so afraid of love / Is so afraid of hate / What’s she running / From now?”

  The song was called “Afraid,” and it was about both of us. In less than forty-eight hours, I had gone from being repulsed by this girl to falling in love with her to having my heart broken to being repulsed with myself. I fell into a fitful sleep for a few hours, then left her a message. Breaking every rule of making a woman want you by not seeming too eager, I told her that I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time and I begged her to call me. She did, and apologized for running off scared. She had been so drunk, she said, that she couldn’t even remember whether we had fucked. I told her that we had fucked all night, and that afterward she had said I was the best lay she’d ever had.

  After a few more dates, just when everything was starting to work out, Donna screeched into my driveway and came charging at me waving a fax I had written. Evidently Jenny McCarthy’s manager and boyfriend worked with Donna’s manager. And when he heard about the new man in Donna’s life, he produced the form letter that I had written to Jenny McCarthy asking for a date. All of a sudden, I went in Donna’s estimation from being a lonely, lovable rock star to a misogynist star-fucker.

  To make matters worse, that afternoon we were playing with my son Gunner when Brandi burst into the house saying that it was her week to have him. Gunner was having a good time and didn’t want to leave, but Brandi insisted. Though Gunner began to scream and cry, she didn’t seem to care at all. In front of Donna and Gunner, she started to yell and humiliate me. I stormed out of the room, loaded the nine-millimeter gun in my room, and swore that this time I’d do it. I was going to shoot that cold-hearted bitch in the head. I could hear Gunner’s screams reverberating through the house. All my logic circuitry shut down and my mind went black with anger.

  I came tearing into the hallway, but Donna caught me. “Take it easy, Scarface,” she said.

  After a few minutes of arguing, I handed her the gun and barreled past her into my son’s room. But Brandi and Gunner were nowhere to be found. She had already left with him. I collapsed onto Gunner’s bed and burst into tears. I was a total fuck-up: I had probably scared Donna away forever.

  A funny thing about girls, though, is that the more you do wrong, the more they like you. Between those stupid faxes and my uncontrollable temper tantrum, she could see that I was a lost little boy who was badly in need of help. So she began helping me. The next day she came over to my house with a gift-wrapped present: a fifteen-disc CD-ROM called “Family Tree Maker.” I typed in my name, then my father’s name. The CD drive whirred and my parents’ names appeared on the screen. Below them was my birth name and that of my brother, Randy Feranna. Wait! My brother Randy? I didn’t have any brothers.

  fig. 2

  Clockwise from left: Storm, Nikki, Gunner, Decker,

  Donna D’Errico, and Rhyan D’Errico

  Nobody thought it would work. But it did—for a while. Pamela and I were so fucking happy—everything in our personalities seemed to mesh. She wanted a child more than anything in the world, which was exactly what I’d been wanting since my marriage to Heather. And Pamela was a lot more easygoing and fun to be with. Together, we came up with all kinds of ideas, from furniture companies we wanted to start to clothing lines to screenplays. Instead of holding back our ambitions, our marriage only kicked them into high gear. Her mother and brother eventually apologized and gave the marriage their support, and it was all good. Except for the photographers, who followed us fucking everywhere.

  I didn’t really understand the paparazzi, because I had never experienced anything this crazy with Heather. Back then, the shit was more organized. With Pamela, it was a whole other level of stalking. Photographers would pop out of bushes when we left the house and start high-speed chases with us down the freeway. I couldn’t understand why people wanted so many pictures of her. Maybe if we were naked on the beach I’d understand, but what was so exciting about us walking down the street or getting out of our cars?

  Everywhere we went, someone would yell “Pamela” or “Tommy,” and if we turned, a million flashbulbs went off. If we didn’t turn, they’d start booing and cussing us out. It became a sick game trying to invent elaborate schemes to avoid them: sending her assistant out of the house in a decoy blond wig or switching cars to throw them off our trail. After a few weeks of being treated like dog shit by the paparazzi, we started thinking of them as fucking maggots. I wanted to crush them all: it wasn’t so much the invasiveness as it was the lack of respect for us as human beings. When Pamela collapsed and lost our first child due to a miscarriage (a Lee family curse, my mother said), the paparazzi were so intent on getting photos, they kept cutting off the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Fuck, dude, I could deal with them trying to crash our parties, but trying to crash our ambulance was another story.

  It bummed me out because I’d been wanting kids for so long. I was so jealous of Nikki because he had such beautiful fucking kids. Whenever I was at his place, I’d regress to a two-year-old and play with them for hours. I liked going back to that time in my life when everything was innocent and meaningless.

  I was depressed for months after Pamela’s miscarriage. To cheer us up and get our minds off it, Pamela threw a fucking three-hundred-thousand-dollar surprise party when I turned thirty-three. I came home that night and she said, “I want you to dress like a king!”

  She grabbed a big-ass purple robe and a crazy crown she had bought, then a makeup artist covered me with white face powder so that I looked like the Crow or something. Pamela dressed up as a ringleader in a big ol’ top hat, grabbed me by the hand, and led me to our driveway, where a tour bus covered with birthday banners had pulled up. Inside, there were nine midgets singing “Happy Birthday,” champagne was flowing, and a dozen of my friends were dressed in drag.

  We rode for ten minutes to a nearby place called the Semler Ranch and I stepped off the bus into my own personal Fellini movie. Two rows of flames stretched out for hundreds of feet in front of me. Midgets were everywhere, saying, in their helium voices, “Welcome to Tommyland, welcome to Tommyland, hee-hee-hee,” as they unrolled a red carpet between the lines of fire. In the meantime, all kinds of clowns and acrobats materialized, filling the air with confetti. I wasn’t even on drugs yet, but I felt like I was.

  Pamela, the ringleader, led me and my friends in a parade down the carpet. Ahead of us, a giant on stilts dressed as the devil walked through the tangle of midgets, parting them like a sea. Past him, there was a big sign that said “Tommyland” with a crazy-looking clown on it. As I approached the sign, I realized that Pamela had basically set up an entire amusement park for me. There were fucking Ferris wheels, roller coasters, contortionists in boxes, caged lions, and bubble machines. Underneath an immense tent, a professional concert stage had been loaded up with drums and all kinds of gear for a jam. Also on the stage was my baby grand piano, which Pamela had tricked-out with gold-leaf paintings of koi fish and customized wrought-iron legs. Fucking Slash and the Guns N’ Roses dudes were t
here, as was our friend Bobby of Orgy and his band at the time, the Electric Love Hogs. She brought in dudes from the Cirque du Soleil, which we loved, and cranked our favorite band, Radiohead, on the sound system. There were all kinds of gourmet food dishes, designer drugs, Tahitian dancers, Balinese percussionists, and moving lights, plus a crew with 35mm film and a sound truck to document it all. At 3 A.M. she brought me a cake with fucking Mighty Mouse on it, because he always gets the girl, dude, and then we all played midget football on our knees.

  It was an amazing fucking party from hell. But at the end of the night, when I was all shitty with drugs and alcohol, a dozen ambulances came screaming into the ranch. “What the fuck’s going on?” I panicked, grabbing Pamela.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I hired ambulances to take everyone home because I knew they’d all get too fucked up to drive.” At 7 A.M., I was brought into my bedroom on a big-ass stretcher.

  I always told her that one day when I wasn’t in a rock band anymore and she was through with acting, we would start a party-planning company. She scored such amazing satisfaction from pulling off crazy, elaborate parties that ran without a hitch.

  Ten days after my birthday, Pamela told me that she was four weeks pregnant. I couldn’t have been any happier, dude. We wanted to have a completely natural, drug-free home birth. We didn’t want any fucking ugly hospital lights and none of that butt-slapping, stainless-steel-scale-weighing, needle-poking attitude you get in a maternity ward. With soft music, candlelight, and a midwife on either side of her, Pamela gave birth to Brandon Thomas Lee at 3:02 A.M., on May 6, 1996, after seventeen hours of labor for her and four hundred cigarettes for me. The tears came flooding out when I saw this fucking person come out of my wife right in the fucking master bedroom where we conceived him. I even got to help pull him out, dude. That was hands-down the most golden day of my life, and half an hour later I sat down at the piano and the song “Brandon” just came out of me.

  I didn’t realize it at the time because I was so overjoyed, but there was a downside to all this. Pamela and I got busy having kids so quickly that we never gave ourselves a chance to build a solid relationship. When you combine the time that it takes to be a parent with the time we both devote to our careers, there’s hardly a minute left. I asked her much later, “Why didn’t we work on our relationship more?”

  “We couldn’t,” she replied. “I was pregnant the whole time.”

  When you’re in love with someone, there’s nothing you want to do more than create a baby that’s equal parts you and her. But once you do, you are consigning your love to the trash bin. Because in having a child, you are creating your greatest rival, a person your wife is going to love more than you. Where a husband-and-wife relationship is all about conditions (contracts, marriage licenses, blood tests), a mother–child relationship is all about unconditional love. In both getting what we wanted more than anything in the world, a beautiful boy (and soon after, a second son), we doomed ourselves before we even started.

  Then, there were other factors beyond our control. Pamela and I were chowing down on some dinner and flipping through television stations when we heard our names being mentioned on some news show. On the screen, there was a dude at Tower Video stocking the shelves with videotapes. And we knew just what they were.

  Months earlier, we had taken a five-day houseboat trip on Lake Mead as a vacation. As usual, I brought along my video camera. We weren’t trying to make a porno, just to document our vacation. We watched it once when we returned home, then put it in our safe. The safe was a five-hundred-pound monstrosity hidden underneath a carpet in my studio control room in the garage, where we recorded part of Generation Swine.

  Pamela and I spent that Christmas in London while some work was being done on the house. Afterward, I finished recording in the basement and then dismantled the studio. When the carpet was torn out, I saw nothing but empty space where the safe had once been. There were no broken locks or windows, so it had to have been an inside job. The only people with the keys were my assistant and the construction crew, which, come to think of it, included an electrician who used to be a porn star and knew that business pretty well. The way I figured it, they must have removed the safe with a crane, taken it back to one of their houses, and had it picked or blown open. They were probably after the guns and jewelry in there, but they also ended up with everything personal that was important to us, from family heirlooms to photographs.

  I was so freaked out that I fired the assistant and sic’ed my lawyers on the construction company. The next thing I knew there was a porn peddler from a company called the Internet Entertainment Group phoning me. He said he had bought the tape and was going to broadcast it on the Internet. We had Pamela’s lawyers send them a cease and desist order, but for some reason it didn’t arrive on time. Our lawyers and managers advised us that the best way to minimize the damages was to sign a contract saying that, since the company had us by the balls, we would reluctantly allow a onetime Webcast so long as they didn’t sell, copy, trade, or rebroadcast it. We thought we had won: Hardly anyone would see the video on the Internet, and we could recover the tape and start over.

  So as soon as we saw the shelves being stocked at Tower on the news, we realized the guy had breached his agreement and mass-produced the tape, which, by the way, he never returned to us. I instantly called my lawyer and we took them to court.

  All of this was going down at a real hard time for us: Pamela and I were getting in fights all the time. Trying to have children, continue the careers that consumed us, make a new relationship work, and deal with the nonstop barrage of bullshit in the press was more of a challenge than we ever could have expected.

  Before Brandon was born, we had a huge blowup because, with everything unraveling at once, we both became extrasensitive to each other’s slightest change in mood. If one person said or did something wrong, the other one bristled with hate and resentment. We had little tiffs over nothing all the time. “You are a selfish little baby who thinks of nobody but himself,” Pamela fumed one night over some little thing we had pumped into a major issue. I can’t even remember what it was anymore.

  “I do not want to deal with this,” I snapped back. “It doesn’t fucking matter. I am so sick of wasting our time arguing.”

  “You never want to talk about anything,” she fumed. “I used to think you were so sweet. You tricked me.” And with that, she stormed out of the house and went to spend the night at her condo. Hours later, the phone rang. I picked it up, expecting to hear Pamela on the other end. But, instead, a man started speaking. He identified himself as a doctor and said Pamela had swallowed half a bottle of aspirin at her place and blacked out. She was found unconscious on her bed by a girlfriend who had come over to spend the night and console her. I rushed to the hospital to see her, though the overdose was probably less a suicide attempt than a plea for attention. But it worked, because I had no idea how much our disagreements were affecting her.

  To throw the newshounds off the scent but give them something real to report, we issued a press statement announcing that Pamela had checked into the hospital with what she thought were flu symptoms only to discover that she was pregnant.

  I tried my best to keep my cool after the drama. But it kept getting harder while the news kept getting worse. First, the Internet Entertainment Group started selling a tape of Pamela having sex with Bret Michaels from Poison. Then, the judge in our video case shut Pamela and me down on every privacy issue and allowed the sale of the tape because he ruled that the content was newsworthy. It pissed me off because I don’t ever want my kids to go to a friend’s house and find a video of their parents fucking in the VCR.

  I finally broke down and watched the thing. I couldn’t see the big deal: It’s really just our vacation tape. There’s only a little bit of fucking on there. That hasn’t stopped Ron Jeremy, though, from trying to get me to make a fuck flick for him. I guess if my career as a musician ever fails, I can always be a porn s
tar.

  fig. 3

  Tommy with son Dylan

  “Hi, I’m calling for Randy. I believe that you are my half brother. If your father is Frank Feranna, could you please call me? I don’t know if he is dead or alive. My mother was Deana. And my name is Nikki, or Frank.”

  That was the message I left Randy Feranna. An hour later, his wife called me back and said that she vaguely remembered his father mentioning a half brother. I talked to Randy later that night. He was four years older than me, ran a vacation resort in San Jose, and had grown up on Mötley Crüe records, though he had no idea he was banging his head to the music of a blood relation.

  “I knew of a lady named Deana,” he said, “and I heard she had a son with my dad. But he never mentioned you. My dad—our dad—was a womanizer and a raging alcoholic. He was a wild man, I’ve been told.”

  “But is he alive?” I asked. “I want to talk to him.”

  “He died on Christmas Day. In 1987. He had a heart attack in the shower.”

  Randy told me that our father was buried in San Jose. I had really wanted to meet my dad after all these years, to just look at him and find out more about who I was, what I would become, and even what diseases I was genetically prone to. Most of all, I wanted to know why he never wanted to have anything to do with me my whole life. Since he was dead and buried, I figured that was the end of that. I was probably better off not finding him alive because I only would have been rebuked again and further embittered. I remembered all the optimistic thoughts I entertained when I flew to Seattle to reunite with my mother, only to find a paranoid woman in a mental hospital who would never forgive me and who I could never forgive.

  Donna encouraged me to follow through with my plan of making peace with my father. His death was not a setback, I finally decided, but an advantage, because that way he couldn’t talk back to me. So we flew to San Jose and visited his grave. Donna brought along a video camera and filmed me walking through the cemetery, finding his tombstone, and spitting on it. “Fuck you,” I yelled at him. “You fucking walk out on me when I’m three. Don’t even say good-bye. Then you come back with a sled, like that’s going to make everything okay. You don’t even stick around to see me. Why’d you even bother?”