Cherry on Top

by Bobbie Brown

  After placing second runner-up in the Miss Teen USA contest, I received offers from modeling agencies, and that’s how I moved to LA at age nineteen. I didn’t have long-term goals back then; I didn’t need to because things just seemed to happen for me without much effort on my part. The wind always seemed to blow me in the right direction since I was young, easy on the eyes, and fun to be around.

  I soon became that blithe, entitled model/actress who gets calls for bookings worth thousands of dollars, yawns and says, “I’m too tired.” When Steven Spielberg invited me to audition for the part of Tinkerbell in Hook, I canceled my audition no fewer than four different times because I was hungover. When I did eventually show up, I was drunk and kept spinning around in the office chair.

  Steven stared at me in disbelief. “Bobbie, I want you to know I’m not giving you this part.”

  “Oh.” I stopped spinning in the chair. “Well, why am I here?”

  “Because I wanted to meet the person who no-showed on me four times. You need to get your shit together, lady.”

  I wish I’d listened to Steven Spielberg. So does my mom. Things might have worked out very differently if I’d taken the golden tickets being constantly dangled in front of me.

  My mom chided me for partying so much, but what did she know? I liked having fun. Fun was how I got to be myself, be a kid again, reclaim my childhood. But at some point, my inner child began taking over. It seemed like I couldn’t stop having fun even if I wanted to. Fun would seek me out, stalk me, follow me home long after I’d had my fill. I would walk into a club; the owner would shake my hand and press a bag of coke into my palm. If I booked a fashion campaign, my modeling agent would give me speed to help me drop five pounds before the shoot. I could have said no, but I didn’t know how. Soon, my life was nothing but fun, and it was killing me. I had to get out. Leave Hollywood altogether. So in the early 2000s, I turned my back on the clubs and the parties, and I ran for my life. It was time to move back home.

  “By the way, Subway’s hiring,” my mom told me in the car on the way home from the Baton Rouge airport the day I moved back.

  I screamed, and started kicking the windshield, filled with shame and self-loathing. Why was she rubbing salt in my wounds? Was she angry at me for fucking up all of our beautiful dreams? Was she angry because when it came down to it, I was just like my dad?

  •••

  Being back in Baton Rouge was a surreal rebirth that felt like a major step backward. Not knowing what else to do, I signed up for beauty school. When people recognized me in the corridors and asked me why I was there, I had trouble answering. What could I say without sounding like an asshole? That I was taking a vacation from fame? That I wasn’t strong enough to make it?

  “Just tell them the truth,” my dad said. “Tell them you came home to spend time with your family.”

  You see, he accepted me when no one else did. Bobby Gene understood that addiction is a disease that makes devils of us all. Bobby Gene was the only adult in my life who didn’t judge me because he knew what it felt like to be this lost, to feel ashamed and guilty for hurting the people you love most.

  Those months in Baton Rouge, I’d often find myself on his doorstep, sobbing. And he’d take me in without a word and hug me until the tears stopped. Sometimes he’d play his guitar.

  “Bobbie…I’m gonna show you how to play the blues,” he said, smiling at me.

  Being at my dad’s, listening to him talk, sing, and strum, I could forget the sad feelings for a while.

  This Southern outlaw, ex-military, country-music-loving alcoholic had beaten his wife and was once a walking cliché of toxic masculinity. But he had spent many years looking at himself in the mirror, trying to understand where his anger came from. And now, he wanted to help me do the same. He had become a different man. A man I was proud of. A man who had found Jesus, and who tried to show love to all those who were rejected and scorned by society.

  I was spending a lot of time with my dad, cooking him dinner on the weekends. One day, I noticed he wasn’t eating as much as he used to. He had lost weight, though he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he liked his trim figure and gave me money to buy him a whole new wardrobe. But something wasn’t right. I made him go to the doctor, who ran some tests. For weeks, my dad pretended he was fine, even though his appetite had completely disappeared and he was throwing up every meal he tried to eat. Very quickly, as often happens with cancer, my strong and complicated father found that his body was no longer his friend. He faded away before my eyes, but denying he was sick until the very end. He passed away just before dawn one night, holding my brother’s hand, singing an old hymn, “I’ve Found a Friend in Jesus.”

  Memories of my dad’s kind, unjudging soul lingered on every street corner in Baton Rouge. It was too painful for me to be there with him gone, so I told my mom I was going back to LA and taking my daughter with me.

  Something shifted in me after my father’s death. It reassembled my priorities and reminded me that I had to walk my own path. I couldn’t do that in Baton Rouge.

  “Well, all I’ll say is I hope you’re not getting back into entertainment,” my mom said coldly.

  •••

  The atmosphere between me and my mother remained hostile for years. We were stuck in a loop—she’d lambast my life choices, I’d hate her lack of faith in me, and we’d scream about it. Rinse and repeat. For years, we were at war, deep in the trenches of an anger dug over decades. A couple of years ago, I noticed her anger take an interesting turn. It wasn’t just me she was getting mad at; it was anyone who stepped in her way.

  One day, in Baton Rouge, she began screaming at a group of teenage boys in the street for no apparent reason. “Fuck you, you little fucking shits!” she yelled.

  “Fuck you, bitch!” one of the boys yelled back. My mom dropped her shopping bags and raised her fists in the air.

  “Why don’t you come over here and say that to my face, fucker!”

  Wow. Judy had gone full fucking gangster.

  “Sorry, fellas, she drinks…ignore her,” I said, trying to placate the kids.

  “I DON’T DRINK AND I NEVER HAVE!” screamed my street-fighter mom.

  I dragged her back to the car in order to avoid a gang fight.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I asked her.

  “Go fuck yourself, Bobbie.”

  My mom had always had a sharp tongue, but this language was really out of character.

  Turned out, there was a reason for my mother’s personality change: years of fried chicken, cakes, and sweets had clogged her carotid artery, and a lack of oxygen to the brain can have the curious side effect of transforming Martha Stewart into Satan. A surgery removed the blockage and soon afterward, with fresh oxygen pumping into her brain, she remembered her old self. No more fights with strangers. Just fights with me. Always with me.

  She came to Los Angeles to visit my brother’s baby, and I noticed she’d lost a lot of weight. My brother thought she had an eating disorder, but at sixty-five, with a lifetime of baking and deep frying behind her, anorexia seemed unlikely. All I could think about was what happened when my dad got sick. The loss of meat from his bones. The sunken cheeks. The sickening realization that I had taken this person for granted for so many years. If my mom got sick, it would fall on me to become the matriarch of our family and be the anchor for Taylar and myself. The thought was so overwhelming. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to be that person. I’m still not.

  I begged my mom to go to the doctor. “Okay, okay,” she said, reluctant to put herself through more tests. The day of her appointment, I was a nervous wreck. I felt waves of guilt, thinking back on all the fights we’d had, the stress I’d put her through over the years. How it must have felt, watching me unravel time and time again while she raised my daughter. After all that she’d been through with my father. I promised I wo
uld never take her for granted again. Just please, God, let her be okay.

  Then, a photo of something horrible popped up on my phone. A fleshy black hole. It was my mom’s esophagus. She’d been losing blood for at least a year. The only option was surgery, but my mom refused. She said she felt too weak.

  “Tell me what my mother should do,” I asked a psychic that afternoon, offering him no other information.

  He frowned. “Something needs to be addressed, and quickly. In the next two weeks. Otherwise, it’s going to be bad.”

  I called my mom immediately. “You have to get the surgery! Please, Mom, I’m begging you…” I don’t think she’d ever heard me so upset. Within a day, my mom had scheduled the surgery. She’s been recuperating, step by step, ever since.

  “You matter so much to me, Mom, I wish you’d take better care of yourself,” I told her, after the operation. The irony was not lost on Judy.

  “Yes, I wish you’d take better care of yourself, too, Bobbie.”

  After that, something shifted between us. We started having the talks we never had. About life. About the mistakes we’d both made. About how, for all our differences, we’re so very similar. Finally, the storm that had raged between my mother and myself for so many years began to subside. That’s the strange gift of illness in the family, I suppose. Even death has a hidden light that, if allowed to turn on, can provide wisdom and remind you to take care of everyone whom you love. Including your parents.

  Stay Gold

  Josh, my ex, came over unannounced, and not for the first time.

  “I’m busy,” I said, standing on the doorstep.

  “Oh, you’re busy?” Josh gave me that look. He knew I was weak, that I hadn’t quite gotten over my taste for things that are bad for me. So he kept trying, over and over. It was just a game to him, one he’d won many times before.

  “I’m trying to write my comedy set. Leave me alone,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sure, babe. I’ll come by another time.”

  He kept sniffing around, a stray cat looking for scraps. Well, guess what: kitchen’s closed. I’d been down that road too often, and each time, it took me somewhere painful. I would just erase him from my life entirely if I could, but he always found a way to reach me. He was cunning, with multiple identities on social media. If I blocked him, he simply opened a new account and messaged me from that one, carrying on the conversation as though nothing had happened.

  “Baby, if you want me to come over, just say so.”

  “Baby, are you hungry?”

  “Baby, let me in.”

  He wanted me—at least for the night—and then he’d slink away. That was probably how it should always have been between us; some people are never meant to be more than overnight visitors.

  My family knew that about Josh the second they met him. They couldn’t believe I had fallen for the first guy I matched with on Tinder. My stepdad William Willamson told him, “I hope you know you’ll never be worthy of her, son.” And my mom asked him if he required a babysitter.

  But Taylar was the meanest.

  The first words she said to him were “you’re not my father.” Her Christmas presents to him were always interesting: a bag of dirt one year (“’cause he’s a dirt bag, Mom…”), a gay porn paperback called Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt another year. When she learned he’d been sending dick pics all over town, Taylar declared war.

  Well, I guess I’m going to have to hunt you down and punch your dick off now. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day when you least expect it, I am going to find you and it’s going to happen.

  Taylar sent that text message to Josh followed by a groin protector cup, which she sent to him in the mail.

  When we finally broke up, following the syphilis-that-never-was incident, Taylar took the opportunity to remind him exactly what she thought of him.

  Dear Josh,

  Now that you and my mom are broken up and you finally pushed her too far, I feel that I can express myself freely. You might as well do yourself a favor, stop delaying the inevitable, and move back to the ol’ homestead on a farm in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, where you can fulfill your destiny of rapidly fading into obscurity. It’ll probably be less embarrassing moving home now as opposed to when you’re forty and still haven’t accomplished anything and have nothing to show for yourself. Why waste any more time? I’m sure you can find some young girl to abuse emotionally and send unimpressive dick pics to…. You think you’re hot shit, but you’re repugnant. You think you’re tough, but you’re a coward. You think you’re smart, but I’m smarter. You think you’re mean. I’m meaner.

  Wow. Taylar has always had a way with words. Ironically, I think she got through to Josh in a way that I never could because quite soon after she sent him that message, he started his own business.

  •••

  During one of the last fights Jani and I ever had, he broke his guitar over the coffee table in our house in Tarzana, yelling, “I’m not the man in this family!”

  It’s a perplexing attitude, the idea that men and women should act a certain way in relationships. I think there are leaders and there are followers and whether you’re a man or a woman is beside the point. I tend to lead in relationships because I have a very strong personality, but that doesn’t make me a man. It makes me Bobbie.

  Jani didn’t like it, but he wasn’t strong enough to tame me. Tommy came close, until I rebelled, and he watched in horror as his perfect almost-wifey Bobbie turned into a maniacal zombie, a skeletal drug fiend clawing at the walls and hell-bent on escape. Some caged animals bite back, you see…

  I don’t want to be in the driving seat anymore, as I was with Josh and Jani. And I don’t want to be a passenger either, like I was with Tommy. I want something in the middle. Someone grounded and mature enough to hold his own, but free-spirited and up for adventure. My only chance of finding that, I think, is to date people closer to my own age—uncharted territory for me, since I’ve never in my life loved anyone over the age of thirty-four. Tommy was thirty-four when we split. So was Josh. Jani was twenty-seven when we divorced. In all my years of dating, I’ve yet to experience a relationship with anyone more than a year older than Jesus was on the cross. For some reason, the hot silver foxes of the world, the men of means and looks, have always been invisible to me.

  A famous French author was once chastised online for saying he could never be attracted to a fifty-year-old body. Honestly, I agreed with him. (His body in particular was as appealing to me as a used dog poop bag floating down the LA River.) This is why I was never able to sleep with the Rod Stewarts of the world; despite their wealth, flair, and confidence, all I could think was “how low do those things actually hang?” Hot, young guys with an edge—that’s always been my type—much like the fifty-something French author who’s happiest being naked with women who are twenty-five and preferably Asian.

  When we were in our twenties, some of my friends preferred the company of older men and would quite happily have dated that middle-aged Frenchman. They enjoyed older guys’ savoir faire, the quality of their conversation, their understanding of human relationships. The money helped too. But my brain has always operated more like a man’s. For me, a firm body trumps a full wallet. A pretty face staring adoringly at mine is more appealing than a wise mind.

  I’ve tended to judge men over forty as harshly as I’m sure they now judge me, and I’m paying the price. Most days I’m knee deep in romantic overtures from men in their twenties who start love letters with, “Is your ass still hot?” This usually leads into, “Kinda sorta wish you were choking on my dick right now,” which I suppose is sweeter than some of the messages I receive from women, who are like, “AREN’T YOU THAT WHORE WHO COULDN’T TAKE CARE OF HER KID?”

  And that’s just on social media.

  Every time I’m bored enough to venture onto Tinder, Bumble, or
Hinge, it’s a shit show. For instance:

  “I hope you like barbecues, because I’m gonna slap this meat across your grill.”

  “I like my breakfast sausage blown.”

  “Hey, do you like my belt buckle? It would look better against your forehead!”

  “I’d like roses on my casket after you murder this dick.”

  Yes, those are some of the actual, real messages I have received.

  Not long ago I accidentally swiped right on a young guy who convinced me to give him my number so that we could text. But then he had the audacity to call me on the phone instead—which, today, is the equivalent of showing up at somebody’s front door naked.

  “Why are you calling me?” I asked him.

  “Because you didn’t respond to my text.”

  “So?”

  “Aw, you’re a shy cookie, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a shy cookie. I’m a busy cookie, child. Goodbye.”

  I wished I could rent a billboard over the Sunset Strip reading “Bobbie Brown No Longer Dates Millennials.” I wanted Josh to see it. I wanted him to know the game was pointless, him coming ’round here, giving me those eyes. Because the days of Bobbie Brown riding that young pony are over.

  Not for a Million Dollars

  I was at a pizza parlor in Silver Lake with Sharise Neil and our mutual gal pal Gretchen Bonaduce. Sugar, spice, and all things nice, we are the two-thirds-blonde-and-a-third-red, Powerpuff alumna of the Sunset Strip. We even have the battle scars to prove it. The three of us know all of each other’s secrets and our most life-changing mistakes, and love nothing more than talking about them.