*
Glen and I had continued talking every day for hours over the course of several weeks, leading up to the band’s five-week tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. In the olden days of the summer of 2009, you couldn’t use your American cell phone in Europe. He figured out we could do an audio version of a Skype call, and despite the time difference, we kept up with the daily calls. He would tell me where he was, Leeds and Wolverhampton in England, Glasgow in Scotland. I remember thinking that I knew someone who went on and on about Scotland, and then remembered Donald Trump and his stupid golf course. It didn’t occur to me to mention him to Glen. Now that he’d finally stopped calling, Donald Trump was nowhere on my radar.
About three weeks into his overseas tour, Glen confessed something. “Would it be crazy if I told you that I missed you?” he asked.
We had only seen each other twice ever, and we hadn’t even kissed. So, on paper, yes, file under crazy. But I missed him, too. “No,” I said.
“Good, because I miss you,” he said, sighing into the phone. “You should come to Europe.”
“I’ll come to Europe, don’t tempt me.”
It became like a dare. He clearly didn’t think I would just hop on a plane to see him. But maybe he knew the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t.
I knew he was playing the last day of Pinkpop, a famous three-day festival held at Landgraaf in the Netherlands. Because it’s outdoors, the venue can hold something like sixty thousand people, and Bruce Springsteen opened that weekend in 2009. Hollywood Undead were on the final night, Monday, June 1, on the tent stage with acts like the All-American Rejects and Katy Perry.
I hung up and bought a five-thousand-dollar plane ticket to Belgium. It was as close as I could get to Landgraaf, which can host such a big festival because it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere. I danced Friday and Saturday nights in Pittsburgh, then sent my luggage home with my roadie and went directly from the club for a 6 A.M. flight.
My adrenaline and “I’ll show you” energy had been pumping, so I didn’t think about what I had done until they closed the cockpit doors. This was crazy for me. Christ, what if I got there and I just hated this guy? What if this was only working because it was all on the phone and all in my head? And then I’d be trapped there for four days. On a bus with a band. What was I thinking?
When we landed in Brussels, I had a car pick me up to take me the hour-and-a-half drive to Landgraaf for the Pinkpop festival. It was only when I got out with my suitcase and saw this massive arena surrounded by a fence that I remembered one little detail: I didn’t have a ticket. People pay hundreds of euros for tickets, and they buy them way in advance. The weekend was sold out, as it had been the year before and the year before that. But I had to get in there.
I scanned the area and spotted a low part of the fence. I threw my suitcase over, scaled the fence, and just took off running. I heard security behind me, yelling as they chased me.
I looked back as they were gaining on me, and I saw a golf cart racing toward me. At the wheel was Brian Pomp, who recognized me. Brian was the front-of-house engineer and, most important, owner of the only working cell at the festival.
“She’s with the band!” he yelled, approaching me.
“I’m with the band!” I yelled back at them. Brian got to me before they did, quickly handing me a laminate. It was like a magic amulet, and I turned and held it up to the security guards. It was like I’d scaled the Berlin Wall, and I was safe now on the other side.
“Let me take you backstage, Stormy,” Brian said. We drove there, and as we approached I saw that the stage was this huge open-air arena with about sixty thousand people already facing it. The “backstage” was a huge collection of temporary buildings, prefab cabins for each band and act. Musicians and crew were all hanging out in the summer sun, jamming and talking.
As Brian got closer to the Hollywood Undead cabin, Glen and I spotted each other. He broke into a run when he saw me, and I jumped out to run toward him. He gave me the hugest hug, and right there in a place we’d never been, we kissed for the very first time.
We would make out so much over the next four days that at the end my lips were raw. The festival had the best vibe, and I just sat with him backstage as one superstar after another walked by. Katy Perry in a polka-dot summer dress, and the All-American Rejects, already practiced rock stars. Hollywood Undead played, and I got to see him work up close. There’s nothing like watching him play drums. The band was never great or anything like that, but he is incredible.
Afterward, we went to the main stage to watch the last of the show. The headliner for the final night was Snow Patrol, a Northern Ireland band whose single “Chasing Cars” had been big in the States a few years before. But they had become absolutely huge in Europe. That year, “Chasing Cars” was named the most widely played song of the decade in the UK.
We got to stand down in front, in the wide VIP gap where security stands between the stage and sixty thousand screaming fans. The final song was “Chasing Cars,” a pure love song inspired by something the lead singer’s dad had said about some girl he was in love with. He was like a dog chasing a car, said his dad. He’d never catch it and wouldn’t know what to do if he did.
We were standing there, the sun was just setting, it was getting dark. About three minutes in, as the song reached a crescendo, the singer let the audience sing for him. Behind us, sixty thousand people paid tribute to impossible love. “Would you lie with me,” they all sang, “and just forget the world?”
Glen put his arms around me. It became, and would remain, our song.
I went on to the Amsterdam leg of Glen’s tour, and the whole trip was magical from start to finish.
It was among the best four days of my life. I finally grew some balls and did something crazy. And it worked out.
*
I cannot say the same for my listening tour. I recommitted to it in July, giving it a try more out of obligation than desire to actually run. It was better than being in Tampa with Moz. I was doing more national interviews, to get myself excited about it again … and then my campaign manager’s car got blown up.
Brian Welsh had parked his 1996 Audi convertible outside his apartment building in New Orleans the night of July 23. He and his wife were out walking their dog when the car exploded at eleven fifteen. I was told it was because of a Molotov cocktail, and Welsh posted a surveillance video that, sure enough, showed a person wearing a white shirt messing with the car shortly before it exploded in an action-film ball of flames. The New Orleans Fire Department didn’t rule out foul play but said the car didn’t technically explode. A small consolation, considering it looked like something you see on the news about Iraq.
“Clearly, if someone tried to blow up my car, it’s cause for concern; it’s not cause for me to stop doing my job, stop me from talking about the things that are important,” Welsh told a reporter. Good for him, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to continue if it meant my car could be next. I went home to Tampa to think about it and walked into a different kind of trap.
The afternoon of Saturday, July 25, I got to my house, which was always a cute little house even if I was stuck with Moz in it. It was a two-thousand-and-change-square-foot two-story with a porch and palm trees out front. I walked in around three o’clock to discover that Moz’s dad had been over earlier and once again chosen to do my laundry. That sounds like a nice gesture, but let’s just say that in the past I had repeatedly told Moz that I was creeped out by his dad repeatedly going into our hamper and touching my dirty underwear. I didn’t even want Moz touching my underwear anymore, let alone his dad. So, when I realized it had happened again, I was pissed.
That was what set me off, and I yelled at Moz about it. Making matters much worse, I opened some bills that hadn’t been paid, only to realize that a bunch of money was missing out of our bank account. I threw a potted plant hard into the sink, to water it or maybe just to make a point that I was tired of all
this and I wanted to start my new life without him. Yes, it hit the sink hard, but it was away from Moz.
I could feel the rage building in me—I am serious about my underwear and my money—so I wanted to leave. And Moz didn’t want me to. He had my car keys, holding them high over his head when I lunged for them. When I tried to get them from him, he said I hit his head. Maybe, but it certainly wasn’t my intention. I wanted to get the fuck out of there.
He then walked into the living room like it was some sort of game, and I followed him. I knocked over our wedding album from the coffee table, which in turn knocked over two shitty candles I never liked anyway. And Moz, this publicist who had drilled into me the Hollywood rule that you never let police get ahold of the story before your PR has had a chance to spin it, suddenly decided to call the police.
And here came his new friends, the cops, rolling up to the house. They took a look at this guy, five foot nine and weighing in at 175 pounds, and arrested me for domestic violence. “I observed the victim to have no physical injuries, marks, or scratches on his body,” Officer DeSouza writes in the police report. “His demeanor was calm and very friendly.” Of course it was. I could have easily lied and said he hit me, but I would never, ever do something like that.
There are little check marks on police reports to help officers assess your attitude. I got all nos on “Alcohol Consumed,” “Fearful,” “Threatening,” “Uncooperative,” and—thank God—“Pregnant.” Next to “Angry,” you bet there’s a check mark. Oh, yeah, and on “Crying,” but it’s hard for me to admit that.
They took me to central booking at Hillsborough County jail, and they got their mug shot. There were no charges pressed, and I was free to go, but that mug shot sure was convenient to run on all the stories that focused on what a setback this was to my potential campaign. All the outlets hyping the story made note that I was “upset because of the way the laundry had been done,” but curiously left out my estranged publicist husband’s dad going into my hamper to get my dirty underwear. I never went back to that house again.
Between my campaign manager’s car going up in flames and me getting arrested so my mug shot would be everywhere, I got the message. I ended the listening tour and called off the campaign. But I wanted to make one final point in my statement. “The simple fact that David Vitter has five million dollars in his bank account pretty much says it all. Against that sheer accumulation of special-interest dollars, I have no legitimate means of winning a race for the United States Senate.… I am not not running for the U.S. Senate because I am an adult entertainment star. I am not running for the U.S. Senate for the same reason that so many dedicated patriots do not run—I can’t afford it.”
Flash forward to where those men in my life ended up: Vitter won, of course. He went on to vote to defund Planned Parenthood and block a rare bipartisan energy bill—which promised to reduce the nation’s energy costs by four billion dollars and slow climate change. He unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2015 and decided not to run for reelection. In March 2018, he registered as a lobbyist for Cajun Industries LLC, a construction company run by Lane Grigsby, a megadonor to conservative candidates and causes. Two months earlier, President Trump had nominated Vitter’s virulently antichoice wife, Wendy, to be a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. During her hearing in April, Wendy refused to answer whether she thought Brown v. Board of Ed—the 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment—had gone the right way. But I’m the sicko.
As for Moz, he dragged out the divorce, fighting over everything and refusing to just sign the papers. I just wanted to be done with him, and one time I point-blank asked him: “Why are you being such a pain in the ass about this?”
“You’re my wife and you’re staying that way,” he said. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.
*
Serial monogamist that I am, Glen and I immediately got together as I extricated myself from Moz. He told me he had a place in L.A. that he crashed at when he wasn’t on tour. I wanted to see him, so I scheduled an L.A. shoot for when he would have some time off. He got there a few days before me, and every time I called him I would ask what he was doing. The answer was always the same: he was either walking to Subway or coming back from there. Around the fourth time, I thought, This motherfucker loves sandwiches.
“How many sandwiches are you gonna eat?” I finally asked him.
“Not Subway. The subway.”
“L.A. has a subway?”
It does—who knew? Glen lived like a kid who happened to be a rock star. He had no car and, as I would find out, no real apartment. He just rented a room from some chick down one of the side streets across from the Guitar Center in Hollywood. “There’s no reason for me to get a place of my own because I’m gone all the time,” he assured me. But he also warned me that his roommate was “kinda” weird.
What he did not tell me was that when you got to this apartment, as I did the night before my shoot, you opened the door to a living room with nothing in it except a giant hot-pink papier-mâché squid. Its long, foot-wide tentacles were everywhere, climbing up the walls and resting on windows. It had suction cups about the size of my fist.
“She adds to it when she’s high,” Glen said.
I had so many questions. I still have so many questions. But I escaped the sea creature and got to his room. He had a mattress on the floor, a skateboard, a drum kit, and some clothes in a box. Nothing else, certainly not an air conditioner. I stayed over, and all through the night people threw bottles in the Dumpster right by his window. In the morning I showered after Glen showed me how to use pliers to turn the water on.
One night was enough for me. “I’m out,” I said, “and you’re coming with me. We’re gonna rent you an apartment.”
The new place became one of our landing pads when we weren’t on the road. Glen respected my job and never asked me about my past relationships. It never once occurred to me to say to Glen: “Guess what I did one time? I fucked Donald Trump.” Who gives their partner a laundry list of the people they’ve had sex with?
But I admit I was intensely curious about his. Not out of jealousy, but this was the first grown person I had been with who was not from the porn world. He had slept with—let’s be real—fucked loads of women on tour. He would tell me what he did with girls, and I would have to stop him like a sheltered anthropologist of sex.
“Wait, what?” I remember saying. “You didn’t know this girl and she just grabbed your dick? People do that in real life?”
He described things that maybe I hadn’t done on camera but certainly had directed in porn, but I thought it was all just fantasy. Tales of women wanting double penetration in a threesome or demanding that he cum on their face.
“You are joking,” I would say. He thought it was funny that I was so ignorant about what happened in the real world, but everything I learned about sex was from working in porn. I didn’t even know how to have a one-night stand. I could not imagine walking up to someone in a bar and saying, “Can I suck your cock? Meet me out back.” But this had happened to Glen! Out there in the straight world. I couldn’t get my head around it and I still can’t, to be honest.
As I pressed for more details about life in the real world, he let slip about one person he slept with who I never expected: my friend Amanda. Yes, the one who thought he was too dirty to even get in her car the night I met him.
“What?” I yelled, way, way more out of surprise than annoyance. “She hated you! You fucked her?”
“Maybe I didn’t,” he said. “I remember her kissing me and then I woke up and she was in bed with me.”
“You totally fucked her!”
I didn’t blame either of them. They didn’t think I had any intention of dating him. Soon after that I was in Tampa and I bumped into her on a night out networking. She was having a drink, and she put her phone down on the bar to give me a hug.
&n
bsp; “How’s it going?” she said.
“I’m just in town for a little bit,” I said. “I’m just back from touring with Hollywood Undead.” I said it very pointedly to see her reaction.
“Oh yeah, that band,” she said. “I forgot. So, uh, you still talk to that guy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you?”
“No, why would I do that? Though, you know, I think I ended up in his room that night.…”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Yeah, but it was totally no big deal,” she said, smoothing her hair. “I actually forgot about the whole thing until you mentioned him.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Cool,” she said.
We sat there, and just as it couldn’t get more awkward, her phone rang. And her ringtone was a song from Hollywood Undead.
I wanted to laugh so hard, but I just smiled at her.
“Um, I’m, uh…,” she said, snatching her phone, “I’m gonna take this outside.”
As with almost everything that happened in my life, I couldn’t wait to tell Glen.
SIX
You know I wasn’t that kid who played Mommy with dolls. I just never had that urge to to be a parent when I grew up. I was going to be a rock star, or at least live like one. Besides, you can’t ride a horse if you’re pregnant, so who would want that? Then my body obviously became a big part of my career, and let’s face it, that shit just looks like it fucking hurts. In fact, childbirth is the worst idea anyone’s ever had.
And then, once I was with Glen, the idea started creeping up on me. It continued to grow once we moved to our new place in Las Vegas. There were a lot of kids around, and I would have a weird feeling when I saw them. Was it maternal instinct? Gas?
I put it out of my mind until one morning when Glen and I were at home. I was on the couch, writing up a script on my laptop. Glen came in like he’d had a revelation.
“I want to have a kid,” he said.
“Ha, ha,” I said. “No.” I went back to typing.
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