by Bobbie Brown
Evil. Pure evil. All of it. All so calculated, none of it driven by of the pursuit of true romance or a great love story. Were we really just a society of convenience shoppers, using and trashing people like throwaway consumer objects? Did we really only view people as a temporary fulfillment of our need to have a date on Valentine’s Day before putting them aside and getting back to the business of casual, noncommittal dating forever?
“Yes,” said Sharise. “That’s exactly what it’s about. We’d better get used to it, Bobbie, because there’s no going back.”
Things were worse than I thought. Jamie was not only breadcrumbing me. He was R-bombing me, forcing me into a textlationship, and potentially benching me until the holiday season when he’d likely cuff me then ghost and potentially haunt and/or submarine me in the future. “Thank God I have you, Sharise,” I said mournfully, cursing the misfortune of being a single, heterosexual, middle-aged woman in Los Angeles.
But Sharise told me not to worry. The new dating culture is only problematic if you focus on the negatives. But if you let go of jealousy, expectations, and old-school fairy-tale ideals, you can have a lot fun dating in the twenty-first century. It’s a free-for-all, where you can meet a different interesting human every single night of the week if you choose. They may not be The One. They may not check your boxes. But maybe, if you’re lucky, they’ll take you on a ride. The rest is gravy.
Tiger Droppings
I booked a headliner gig at Comedy Étouffée in Baton Rouge right before Christmas. I had called the venue myself and talked a good hustle, figuring it would be important to have a paying gig coincide with my visit home for the holidays. The next morning, Google, Social Mention, and Topwalker alerts started pouring into my inbox. I had set them up to notify me whenever anybody anywhere in the world mentioned my name online, including forums. A Social Mention alert led me to a local blog in Baton Rouge called TigerDroppings, named for Louisiana State University’s football team, the Tigers. The headline was:
80s BR video vixen Bobbie Brown now doing stand-up
Someone going by the handle “the paradigm” posted that he had met me a few times fifteen years ago and that “at that time, she had been addicted to crystal meth.” Probably, I thought. He said it was Tommy Lee who had introduced me to drugs, but that was wrong. I found meth all by myself with a little help from the modeling industry, which considers crystal meth a valuable slimming aid, up there with juice cleanses and Pilates.
She “was shacked up with some rich old dude in Malibu,” the post continued.” Wrong again. As already established, I am allergic to financially solvent men and have never dated anyone over the age of thirty-four.
“Theparadigm” capped off his reportage with this regrettable detail: “I could probably fill a small swimming pool with the amount of semen I rubbed out to her back in the day.” Then, he posted a really horrible photo of me from about eight years ago, which he claimed is what I look like now. I cringed, cursing the Internet and wishing it had never been invented.
His buddies chimed in.
“Kingbob” described me as “an insufferable count,” adding, “If she was hot, it’d be one thing, but she’s all ate up with the fatness.” I wished I were an Insufferable Count, being rude to my servants in some glorious castle in Europe somewhere—but probably he meant to call me a cunt. Being shamed for my body, my age, my past—it’s water off a duck’s back at this point. Hate is addictive, especially when it is spewed from the safety and comfort of your own computer without you ever having to look into the eyes of the person you’re insulting. Cyberbullies tend to lack fulfillment in their IRL lives and the false sense of superiority they feel online can be addictive.
“btw-May have to rub one out to her tonight for old times’ sake,” “BuckyCheese” kindly added, as did “HotCarl,” who said, “I may have beat off to ‘Cherry Pie’ more than any other video in my youth. Billy Idol’s “Rock the Cradle of Love” is probably up there too.”
“Tgrbait08” said, “Used to go see her strip in Laffy back in the nineties.” THIS IS FAKE NEWS. I’ve never stripped, and I don’t appreciate being misrepresented in the media. Then they started saying mean shit about Taylar, how she was a cold bitch, and my patience ran out. I signed up for a TigerDroppings account with the name “bobbiejbrownbitches.”
Time to set the record straight.
“First of all, that ‘Now’ pic you posted is seven years old,” I wrote. “Do a current search if you want to be accurate. And ya, everyone knows I had a drug problem then, I wrote a bestselling book about it.” I also said, “I have never stripped a day in my life. Do your homework.”
The next day, I got a Social Mention alert leading me straight to another steaming pile of tiger turd.
“Bobbie Brown goes on a rant,” it said, with “tgrbait08” insisting, again, that he saw me strip. “I saw you live and in person quite a few times stripping/dancing whatever you want to call it at a strip club in Lafayette back in the nineties. I even remember the perfume you wore. It was White Diamonds.”
I was so mad. White Diamonds? The Elizabeth Taylor fragrance that smells like grandma’s underwear?
I imagined myself coming back to Baton Rouge, being mocked by these guys, being shamed for my past, being judged for my body and the fact that I’m no longer twenty-one. Even for someone like me, a survivor of the most crassly misogynistic music scene ever, it’s still challenging to navigate the hate and disrespect online, especially now that I’m older. I wondered if I should cancel the show—but I knew that would be a mistake. You have to do this, Bobbie, I told myself. You can’t hide from the hate—you have to face it head on.
•••
People love to hate Bobbie Brown. They really do. My hate club extends across the continental United States, incorporates Alaska and several islands in Hawaii, and stretches into the Canadian territories and some parts of Mexico. It’s like NAFTA, but meaner. Two haters have actively stalked me for years, LaceyShore1 and Sammi1. The words they use suggest they’re familiar with my reality show, Ex-Wives of Rock, and my first book, Dirty Rocker Boys. Every day, for years, they sent me little bundles of hate. Every single day. I wondered how they were able to juggle jobs, kids, and social lives while spending so much time dumping on my Facebook feed, spewing on my Instagram, and even sending hate mail to my personal email. I had to give it to LaceyShore1 and Sammi—they were nothing if not committed.
I recently gave an interview where I mentioned that a storyline on Ex Wives of Rock that showed me buying my costar, Athena Lee (Tommy’s sister), a pair of fake tits was, well, fake. Athena got the tits, but I didn’t pay for them, the show did. The interview came out and there she was, LaceyShore1, dumping a little basket of poop on my day.
“Can you believe it about Athena’s tits? Bobbie Brown is such a fucking liar. She’s always been a liar.”
I very rarely block people who are not Josh, but LaceyShore1’s number was up. I hit “block.” For good measure, I blocked Sammi too. Maybe they could get back to their jobs and families now and leave me the hell alone.
The next day, a message popped up on Instagram. It was Sammi, her tone unusually polite.
“Bobbie, I’m sorry. I know you’re mad about me being a jerk to you. Now I know I was wrong. And please unblock LaceyShore1. She wants to apologize to you too.” She explained that the Sammi on Facebook was no longer the real Sammi. “That’s just a fake profile from people at my school. I go by BillieChurch now.”
School? She was a high schooler?
“We are trying to change,” said Sammi. “What we did is like Blue starting drama, because Blue was our favorite on the show, but we don’t want to be like Blue anymore.”
So they were fans of Ex Wives, and their favorite character was Blue! No wonder they were assholes! Blue Dixon, the ex-wife of Warrant’s Jerry Dixon and my costar on the show, had always been unbearable to me. We’d e
ndured several run-ins during the sixty-odd episodes, and one time I almost threw a drink in her face when she suggested that I had gotten thin by being on drugs again. She also accused me of using Jani’s death as a ploy to sell books. Those dramas, unlike Athena’s tits, were not invented by the producers. In Blue’s opinion, I was nothing but a has-been who wrote a tell-all about her whoredom. “Which is rich,” as I told her, “coming from a never-was.” Clearly, as far as Sammi and her friends at school were concerned, the animosity made for great playground gossip. Knowing that these were teenagers helped me understand that they weren’t mature enough to understand that Blue, Athena, Sharise, and I are real people with real feelings.
“I think you should change,” I wrote to Sammi, trying to craft a gentle response for these young, impressionable minds. “Think about all the negativity you’ve caused and the time you’ve wasted doing it when you could be focusing on yourself, your friendships, your life, and your path, and finding what really makes you happy.” I felt this was a “Come to Jesus” moment for them, a fork in the road. And I wanted to do whatever I could to help them become kind people, not cyberbullies.
“Only insecure and miserable people behave in ways that y’all have, and that’s unfortunate,” I typed. “Anyone with a heart would never want to be responsible for someone else’s pain. Just think about that and remember, whatever you put out into the universe triples and eventually comes back to you. That’s what they call ‘karma.’ Trust me, it really does work that way, I should know.”
I never got hate mail from LaceyShore1, Sammi, or BillieChurch again. They were just kids, still figuring out that negative actions have negative consequences. Aren’t we all?
* * *
1 Names have been changed.
Ice Cream has a Soul
Princess Poot
Once upon a time, long ago and far away
The whole kingdom gathered to celebrate a
special day
In honor of their princess, or so legends say.
She was lovely and lively and gentle and
Warm, full of compassion, and whimsy, and
Charm. Her eyes shone as bright as the full moon
At night, and she never did anyone any harm.
She was admired and adored by all, as she
Had been since she was small. Every lady and man
In the kingdom had come
To attend her debutante ball.
Now, in order for this tale to make sense,
You must first understand
That, years ago, a law had been instated in
The land, which declared the act of passing gas
To be
Universally banned. This sacred rule
Applied to each one of society’s tiers. Never
Under any circumstance, could a fart be
Expelled from their rears.
Even in the king’s palace this law was
Upheld. Not a poot could be heard, nor a toot
Ever smelled.
—Excerpt from Princess Poot, A Children’s Story by Taylar Jayne Lane
Taylar called to tell me she’d written a book-length kids’ poem called Princess Poot about a princess who farts. She said it was partially inspired by me, or at least, the persona she’d grown up with—the blonde, misunderstood starlet who tells fart jokes. Knowing that I wasn’t the world’s most stable parent, I take comfort in the knowledge that perhaps I’ve inspired her a little. And made her laugh. Like the time I saw mermaids on TV and called Taylar to verify whether mermaids are actually real, like Medusa. For some reason, I always thought there was an island of Medusas, somewhere in Europe, a short boat row from Mermaid Island. If there’s one thing Taylar’s always been able to rely on her mom for, it’s entertainment.
For all we’ve been through, we’re much closer than most mothers and daughters I know. Ours is a full-disclosure relationship; no topic is off limits, no subject too taboo to be discussed.
“You talk about that with your daughter?” people ask.
And the answer is yes. Anything and everything. When she started dating her first boyfriend at seventeen, she told me that they had tried anal sex. The next day I called her while she was at school and reminded her, “You know you don’t have to do that, right?”
When I went on a date with Tom Green, Taylar was the first to hear about my experience with his iconic sole testicle. When Joey Fatone from *NSYNC tried to lure me into his bed by telling me that his dick was “the size of a tuna can,” it was Taylar I called to help me understand what that meant. We were both very confused.
“Pretty much sounds like a mega chode, Mom,” she said sagely.
Perhaps the reason Taylar and I get along so well is because she reminds me of her dad. Like Jani, she’s an old soul. She’s sensitive. She was the kind of kid who would cry if she dropped her ice cream. “It’s just ice cream, I’ll get you another,” I’d say.
“No, Mom. It’s not just ice cream. It has a soul.”
Taylar became disillusioned early on. She was more cynical than some kids and downright pessimistic at times. She knew the world could be evil, cruel, selfish, and unfair, and she learned a lot of difficult life lessons by watching me experience them. It made her tough—or, some might say, cold. At a young age, Taylar perfected her killer eyeroll. When she was a kid in Baton Rouge, soccer moms would come up to her in the street and compliment her on her white hair and big blue eyes.
“Oh, my gosh, your hair is beautiful. Where did you get that?”
“From my head, where do you think?” Taylar would say.
“By gosh, child, whose eyes do you have?”
“They’re mine, duh.”
She was five.
My mother would apologize for Taylar’s apparent rudeness. “Sorry, she’s from California,” she’d say, and Taylar would fold her arms, annoyed.
She’s just never suffered fools, not ever.
There’s always been a palpable dynamic between us, kind of like close friends or maybe more like sisters, but also more than that. We make each other laugh and always have each other’s back. There’s always been an element of parent/kid role reversal in our relationship. Taylar has often described me as a childlike person with two sides: playful, affectionate, and imaginative on the one side, and irresponsible, temperamental, and chaotic on the other. Sometimes she felt like her mom needed to be taken care of more than her mom took care of her, so she tried over the years to be emotionally strong for both of us, at least as much as a child can be. We grew up together, and that made us closer somehow, although it wasn’t always fair.
As an adult, Taylar suffers from anxiety—although, like a blonde Wednesday Addams, she’ll never let it show. Instead, all her stress manifests as physical illness and if she doesn’t process her feelings through her writing or work with animals, she becomes nauseated and gets terrible migraines. Of course, every time Taylar gets a headache, I feel crushed, guilt-ridden about my inability to be a “normal” mother. Although if you ask her, she’ll say that she holds no bitterness toward me. For starters, she hates the idea of “normal.” Her generosity and quiet dignity about the more difficult parts of her upbringing continue to astound me. Taylar’s unconditional love brings me to my knees.
I wish I were an easier person. I really do. But things always seem to get so crazy in my life. So maybe it’s no surprise that my daughter’s adult life has been everything but crazy. Taylar’s only had one boyfriend, and they’ve been together since she was seventeen. Financially, her ducks are in a row. She’s been running Jani’s estate since he passed away, and now, at the age of twenty-seven, she’s a homeowner. She works at a dog boarding and grooming facility every day; I see her posting a pictures with a new dog every other hour, her eyes glowing with love for the animals.
I mean…she’s pretty much a perfe
ct human being. An upstanding member of society, an emo Steel Magnolia who has true love in her life and has somehow managed to avoid the worst traits of her addict mom and alcoholic dad. She’s a miracle. I know Jani felt the same way.
•••
Taylar spent the early part of her life with Jani and I, until Jani strayed off the yellow brick road and set up camp at the bottom of a bottle of vodka. Much like my father, Jani was able to hide from his feelings for a while. I think Jani’s addiction stemmed from his deep-rooted insecurity, his fear that his artistry as a musician would never be appreciated in the way he’d always dreamed. His manager and mentor, Tom Hulet, had managed the Beach Boys and Elvis Presley, and that was the kind of impact Jani wanted to make. It didn’t matter that Warrant’s five albums had sold more than ten million copies around the world; even “Cherry Pie,” his biggest hit, our song, couldn’t help Jani shake his underlying sense of frustration.
When we were living together, Jani was working on songs that he thought would cement his legacy as one of the greatest recording artists in rock ’n’ roll. But by the time he felt ready to show the world what he was made of, the world had moved on. Warrant made it big in 1989, the year that the Strip started to lose steam. Kids who were disillusioned with hair metal’s culture of ideocracy, misogyny, and crotch-grabbing excess were building a new scene around clubs like Jabberjaw, an all-ages coffee house and music venue on Pico and Crenshaw, where noise rock, lo-fi, and Riot Grrrl bands performed alongside rising indie stars like Kurt Cobain, Beck, Hole, and Elliott Smith. By 1989, the end of hair metal was already approaching. Grunge went mainstream with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991, the same year Jani and I married. Grunge swept Warrant and their glam metal peers out of the picture. Overnight, Jani and the rest of the peacocks became irrelevant buffoons in the eyes of the industry. Not mine, not Taylar’s. But that didn’t matter. If an artist loses faith in what they’re doing, it doesn’t matter what their family thinks.