Cherry on Top

by Bobbie Brown

  I’ve known Sharise for thirty years. We clicked the second we met, talked nonstop without taking a breath, and immediately became the type of best friends who called each other five times a day, and still do. Those are the special friendships, the ones that only come along a few times in a lifetime. They’re rare, and what’s even more surprising is when they last. We’ve bonded through friendship, motherhood, and divorces from cheating rock star husbands—truly, the best foundation for a friendship.

  She’s still the same slim, perfectly-toned, perfectly-poised, former mud wrestler I knew when she was married to Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil, the guy who rubbed egg burritos on his crotch to hide the smell of other women. The guy who once told a journalist “our only regret is we can’t eat all the pussy we see here tonight.” The guy who…well, you get the picture. They were together from 1987 to 1993, and I met her in 1992, when things were seriously unraveling. Vince was spiraling into lethally reckless behavior, infidelities, and addictions that consumed whatever semblance of love still existed between them.

  Whenever I heard anything questionable about Vince’s behavior from Jani, even if it meant betraying Jani’s confidence, I’d make sure to let Sharise know by using our special girl code. If she asked me a question and I said, “I don’t know,” the answer was yes. Things came to a head when Vince smashed his Ford Pantera into another car in Redondo Beach, California, killing his passenger, Hanoi Rocks drummer Nick “Razzle” Dingley. Even though Vince threatened to cut her off financially if she left, Sharise knew it would be safer for her and her daughter, Skylar, to start over.

  Skylar and Taylar were around the same age and were best friends too. Those were the good times, the four of us together, every day. When Skylar was diagnosed with Wilms’ tumor, a rare kidney cancer that only affects children, she underwent six operations, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments. But the treatments didn’t work and four months after her diagnosis, on August 15, 1995, little Skylar passed away. I was in Louisiana at the time, and after Vince, I was the first person Sharise called. As soon as I hung up the phone, I got on the next flight out of there and showed up at her house with a suitcase. I stayed with her for two months, sleeping in her bed so she didn’t have to be alone while she cried tears no mother should ever have to shed. Sharise and I have been to hell and back together, and our friendship, at this point, deserves a lifetime achievement award.

  Gretchen, while a much newer friend to me than Sharise, is also a “sister from another mister.” She too has a failed showbiz marriage in her past, having been married to Danny Bonaduce, the Partridge Family child star, whom she wed on November 4, 1990—the same day they met on a blind date. Danny may not have been a rock star, but he certainly partied like one, as shown on Breaking Bonaduce, the reality show about their marriage that ran from 2005 to 2006. When Gretchen saw her husband’s infidelities, Napoleon complex, and addiction to steroids paraded for the whole world to see on the small screen, she finally set aside her “stand by your man” principles and packed her bags.

  As we munched on pepperoni pizza, Sharise gave us the dirt on her latest Bumble flirtation. She’d gotten back on the app since the flames of love she’d felt for her firefighter boyfriend had been suddenly put out. They’d been dating a year and a half, never fought, had gone on three vacations, said “I love you,” the whole shebang. A few nights after deciding to move in together, the firefighter said something that didn’t ring true and Sharise’s spidey sense compelled her to look at his phone while he was in the bathroom, something she’d never done before. Turned out, her bullshit radar was on point—she found messages between him and a woman he’d gone on a date with the night before. She didn’t say anything to him. Instead, she quietly gathered her things, brushed her hair, put on lipstick, and kissed him goodbye. Forever.

  When she got home, she called the girl, whose number she’d saved. “Hello, my name is Sharise. Quick question for you: did you happen to go on a date with a firefighter called Steve the other night?”

  “Why, yes, we’ve been talking for a couple of weeks.”

  “Okay, great, thank you for verifying that. Well, I suppose I ought to let you know that he’s my boyfriend; we’ve been together for a year and half. There’s nothing wrong with our relationship. In fact, we just had sex. But if you want him you can have him.” Boom. Sharise never spoke to the cheating firefighter again. Back to Bumble it was.

  She told us about a cute guy in his forties with whom she’d been going back and forth on Bumble for weeks. They’d shared information about their lives, their marriages, their divorces. Small steps toward something that felt like intimacy. Then, after several conversations, he ghosted. “I wish he’d told me that threesomes were required before I got, you know, hopeful,” Sharise said, wistfully.

  “Regular threesomes are a fundamental need for this guy?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He and his ex-wife had an open relationship where they could hook up with men and women, go on threesome retreats, and—”

  “Wait, threesome retreats?”

  “Yeah, wife-swapping and husband-swapping in spa hotels, that kind of thing. I told him I wasn’t into that kind of dating. And that was it. Over. Hard ghost.”

  I had a three-way once, in the late eighties, on the brown, carpeted living room floor of the Hollywood apartment I shared with my Chippendale boyfriend, Steve. One night he brought home a lesbian called Brandi, and I did my sporting best to enjoy myself, even though I’m not attracted to women. That night Steve got Brandi pregnant and since then—call me an out-of-touch monogamous traditionalist—I’ve steered clear of any scenario involving more than two sets of private parts. All that Fifty Shades of Eyes Wide Shut stuff, passing your genitalia around like cupcakes—fine if you’re into it, but not my cup of tea.

  I wondered if our inability to embrace the polyamorous lifestyle was the thing holding us back from finding The One. Maybe there is no The One, maybe there’s The Two. Or The Twelve. Is true love the sum of its (many) parts? I would like to grow old with someone, buy matching walkers, go on cruises to Norway, and hang out at trivia nights in the Valley. But instead of looking for one retirement buddy, would I be better off dating the entire retirement home?

  We decided to consult the Predict A Pen, a fun little toy that Gretchen had bought me for my birthday. You ask it a question, click the top, and it reaches into the future to find answers. “Dare you live by the pen?” the packaging asked.

  Dare accepted, said Sharise, who went first.

  “Will I find the love of my life—even though I don’t want to go on a threesome retreat?” she said, clicking the end of the pen.

  “HELL YEAH,” came the response. A fine verdict.

  Sharise handed the pen to me. I tried to think of a good question to ask. I knew I was never going to be happy sharing my lover with anyone else; I’d want him all to myself. The question was, who? I closed my eyes and blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

  “Does Jamie Kennedy like me?”

  Sharise clapped her hands. She’s convinced I’ll find my next soul mate in comedy. My own personal (monogamous) chucklefucker.

  “IT’S UNCLEAR, ASK AGAIN.”

  I clicked again.

  “IF YOU’RE LUCKY.”

  Defective piece of shit. I clicked again.

  “NOT FOR A MILLION DOLLARS.”

  “The pen has spoken,” I said, handing it to Gretchen.

  Unlike Sharise and me, Gretchen’s sorted on the relationship front; she’s happily in love with a six-foot-five drummer. Her career was in a good place too; she’d just published her memoir and sings in a killer tribute band called The Fatal 80s. Her problem was that she hates LA. “How are my kids ever going to afford rent in this damn town?” she sighed, and I knew exactly what she meant. There’s a Winnebago on every corner in LA with people inside who can’t afford to pay rent because they got one parking
ticket that doubled that turned into a court appearance that turned into their car getting impounded and then a bench warrant and jail. “Justice” in this town has become a way for the city of Los Angeles to finance itself through hefty and unreasonable fines placed on poor people for the most minor and mundane of infractions. Now, me, I’m attracted to abusive situations, which is why I still love living in LA no matter how inhumane it has become. When the big earthquake happens, you’ll see me sitting on the rubble, cracking jokes with the cockroaches. But Gretchen wants out. She wants to live in Arizona, in a nice big house, surrounded by endless blue skies and horses.

  Thus, her question for the Predict A Pen:

  “Will I sell my house?”

  “DUDE, NO WAY,” said the pen.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t want her to leave, ever. She’s generous, appreciative, and always encouraging me to push forward with my career, to focus on myself instead of the relationships that always seem to consume me. Her and Sharise, they’re the closest thing I have to family in LA.

  For some time, Gretchen had been urging me to get moving on a follow-up to my book Dirty Rocker Boys. That book came out in 2013, and a lot had happened since then—most importantly, my new adventure in comedy. “I’m going to put you in touch with my publisher,” said Gretchen.

  “What if they say no?” I fretted. It’s not easy getting a book deal in this day and age.

  “Why don’t we see what the Predict A Pen says?” said Sharise, handing it to me. I took it and closed my eyes.

  “Will I publish a book, become an accomplished stand-up comedian, and find love with an age-appropriate man?”

  I hit the button. Nothing happened. I hit it again. And again. Sharise and Gretchen looked at one another. The Predict A Pen had jammed.

  Running in Flip-Flops

  I felt my cell phone buzz in my jeans back pocket. It was an email from my landlord wishing me a happy Friday, and that oh, by the way, he wanted to inform me that he’d be doubling my rent “in accordance with market values,” giving me sixty days to tell him whether I would accept his rent hike or give up my lease and get out. The horror of the unjust LA rental market was no longer a scary thing that happened to other people. It was now my reality.

  I looked around on the rental sites and what I saw made me want to cry. A nice, grown-up one bedroom in LA with a yard and parking averages $2,200 a month. Besides, I didn’t want to leave my place, not now. I liked my house; I liked the quiet little suburb of Arleta; I liked having a place I could finally call home. I’m no hobo, no tramp steamer, no traveling circus tumbleweed. I’m tired of kicking the can, being a cockroach, popping up in every Goddamn neighborhood in LA—Westwood, Malibu, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Los Feliz, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Woodland Hills, Tarzana, Encino, North Hollywood. I’d lived everywhere, and I was done with it. I liked my house and my private, double garage. Leaving Arleta would mean facing the very real possibility of street parking—words that trigger a specific kind of PTSD for many of us in LA. Street parking means driving around for three hours a night before you find a spot. Street parking means waking up at 6:00 a.m. to avoid getting towed. If you park for longer than seventy-two hours and someone complains, street parking means a $500 ticket. When I lived in Hollywood in a street-parking-only situation, I got so many tickets my car ended up getting impounded. Every day is Mercury Retrograde when you have street parking. Street parking is Satan’s work.

  At the time I received the news about my rent increase I had two of my three bedrooms sublet out. One renter stayed in her room a lot but always paid her bills on time. The second was a man who moved in with just a bed, a desk, and a bottle of lotion. For the first two months, he never spent the night in his room. Then he went to Ibiza for a long while and didn’t elaborate any further. I have never loved living with strangers, but I was grateful to have them because they helped me make my rent and retain access to my big, beautiful garage.

  I sat down with the roomies and asked if they’d be willing to absorb the increased rent if we split it three ways. They both nodded. Of course, Bobbie. We’ll get through this together. Relieved, I told my landlord we’d be staying on. I signed a new lease, and within weeks both of them changed their minds. The girl got a job in Vegas. And the guy, well, I guess he decided to spend more time in Ibiza. Now I was stuck with a fresh, unaffordable lease, no roommates, and no idea what I was going to do.

  I sat at my desk, terrible visions floating through my head. A Winnebago with a “welcome home” mat. A mountain of parking tickets. Thread-bare couches provided by well-meaning friends. Looks of disappointment in my daughter’s and mother’s eyes when I told them that the rug had been pulled out from under me. Again.

  Find the funny, Bobbie, I told myself. It’s all material, remember?

  •••

  I stepped onto the stage and looked out at the crowd of shadows before me, the welcome applause both uplifting and nauseating. The roller coaster ride was beginning again. I gripped the mic and smiled, happy that for almost twenty minutes I could totally forget today’s bad news. Comedy is therapy, a temporary escape from reality, a guaranteed ego boost whatever the weather.

  “Good evening. My name’s Bobbie Brown, and I’m currently in a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend who lives in the future. I can’t wait to meet him.”

  Chuckles.

  “So, the last guy I talked to on a dating app said he lived in a gated community. Prison. He meant prison. Anyway, dating apps are so depressing, occasionally I’ll consider getting back together with my millennial ex. Then I remember I’d rather shit in my hands and clap.”

  Laughter erupted, and endorphins flooded my body.

  “I want a guy who’s cute. Who knows what songs not to talk over. Who’s good at sex. And by ‘good at sex,’ I mean, the kind of sex that sounds like you’re running in flip-flops. The kind so good that even your neighbors need a cigarette after. Unfortunately, most times I have sex these days, guys will literally nut forty-five seconds into it and have the audacity to ask me, did you come? Fuck yeah, I came—to the wrong fucking house.”

  •••

  Two very cute girls came up to me asking for selfies after the show. They said they had flown in from China specifically to see me. CHINA. Seven thousand miles, just to see me. “Holy shit, that’s fucking crazy!” I said, calling over Sharise and pointing at the girls proudly. “Check it out—CHINA!”

  The second they got their selfie they disappeared.

  “Okay, bye,” they said, and shuffled away, trying to be polite. It was strange; I thought they’d at least want to talk some more. Were they in awe of me? I really had to know.

  “Bobbie, stop. You don’t need to be friends with your fans,” said Sharise.

  “Why not? I like them, and they like me,” I said, wishing they would come back.

  “Bobbie, I think your set’s a little schtick-ish,” Sharise said. She thought I should tell real stories about my own life instead of just the zany jokes about made-up dating scenarios. “I understand that going out there and being yourself is going to feel pretty raw, because if they reject your real self it might be too much for you to take,” she continued. “But I think you should dig into your real relationships, with guys, with your mom. Talk about how she wanted you to be a beauty queen, but instead she got this beautiful girl who talks about pubes.”

  She was right. I didn’t want to go there. And I didn’t want to discuss why.

  “Hey, Bobbie!” It was my teacher, Jimmy. “Good work, you kill it every time.” I gave Sharise a look that said “see?”

  “Just one thing,” he added. “Stop writing a new set every time and expecting it to work. Because one day it won’t. And trust me, there’s nothing less sexy than bombing on stage.”

  “Here’s what I think,” I said, irritated with all the well-intentioned, unsolicited advice. “If it ai
n’t, broke don’t fix it.”

  He shrugged. “Your funeral, Bobbie.”

  So what if I wanted to reinvent the wheel every night? So what if I wanted people to come back and see me over and over again and never have to hear the same joke twice? I didn’t want to fall back on the sad, embarrassing stories of my past. I wanted to stand on the edge of the precipice and jump off into the future. My kamikaze approach to comedy was strikingly similar to my approach to life. You either land on your feet or smash your face into a table at the bottom of the stairs. No in between. That’s rock ’n’ roll.

  Hormonally Yours

  I was delirious with stress. The pressure of turning a few one-off shows into a long-running comedy career was weighing on me along with my housing issues. Not to mention, I hadn’t been laid since prehistory. I wasn’t used to such long fallow periods, having generally preferred to have bad relationships with sex to no relationships with no sex.

  Dangerous, self-destructive thoughts floated through my consciousness. Josh…he’s always DTF. What about the young guys on Tinder? If only Jamie Kennedy would just pony up and ask me out on a date. Surely once you’ve texted more than thirty times it’s all right to get naked? But he wasn’t getting the hint. Only one option remained. I could shut my sex drive off altogether. Pull the plug on my blue balls. Come off the hormones I’d been taking to stave off the symptoms of menopause and let the dust finally begin to settle on my trusty four-poster bed…

  Three years earlier, my lifelong desire to have penises inside me suddenly ceased. It was liberating yet confusing, because I had always been very amorous. Even my ex thought I was a freak. I was a sex ninja, a gold medalist in the love Olympics, the goddess of Mount Fuck. A well-oiled sex machine, the kind of lover who could instigate passionate “running in flip-flops” sex four times a day. Then, overnight, I turned into Miss Marple. Get away from me with your…thing! I thought, as Josh approached with that horny puppy dog look in his eyes. I didn’t even want to fuck myself. As my collection of vibrators gathered dust, I wondered what was wrong with me and my dwindling sex drive. Was I consuming too many pesticides and GMOs? Were my concerns about global warming and animal cruelty finally spilling over into the bedroom? Of course not. Deep down, I knew exactly what was happening.