by Bobbie Brown
Jani and I divorced in 1993 after just two years of marriage. He was cheating on me with the model girlfriend of Robbie Crane, the former bassist of RATT who had just joined Vince Neil’s solo band. By this point, Jani’s alcohol-related anger had become frightening. Shortly before his death he confessed to me that part of the reason he drank was because he’d been drugged and raped by a member of a famous heavy metal band and their manager when he was just starting out on the Strip. Stories of women being abused in the rock scene are all too common, but it is rare to hear about the male victims, perhaps because the stigma for them is so much greater. Jani was too ashamed to ever talk to anyone about it, and in the (understandable) absence of a #MeToo movement for male musicians, he suppressed his anger and used alcohol to tune out his feelings of shame.
Taylar went to live with my mother for a year while I tried to rebuild my life after the divorce. I’d always assumed once I got on my feet she’d come back to LA to live with me permanently. But fate had other plans.
When Tommy Lee, whom I had adored from afar since my teenage years, came galloping up in his red sports car, it felt like my knight in shining armor had finally arrived. He pursued me with a hunter’s zeal, and when I finally agreed to sleep with him after three months of courtship, it felt like a dream. When Tommy and I got engaged, the dream felt like it was becoming reality. I truly believed everything was going to be okay, that it was a second chance for me and my daughter to be a happy family. Taylar even started calling him “Dad Tommy.”
But yet again, behind the white-picket-fence fantasy lay two deeply flawed human beings, each battling their own egos and insecurities. Tommy was too possessive and tried to turn me into a perfect Southern Wife, cloistered in his beachfront home in Malibu. When Robert De Niro called the house, offering me an audition for the part Sharon Stone ended up playing in Casino, Tommy said no. He wanted me home with him. Staying home and cooking lasagnas for Tommy while isolated from my friends and family made me start to gain weight, which turned Tommy off. I asked an acquaintance from my modeling days if she had anything that could help me slim down fast. Soon I was in meth’s grip, a paranoid tweaker, and my dreams of a life with Tommy quickly disintegrated. Taylar was there to witness it all.
One day, Taylar was living in a beautiful home on the beach with her mother and Dad Tommy; the next, Dad Tommy was holding her mommy up against a wall by her throat. It was all too similar to what I’d seen Bobby Gene do to my mom, and I knew I had to get out before things got much worse. I ended things with Tommy on account of the physical abuse, but even though I was the one who pulled the plug, it still destroyed me when he exchanged wedding vows with Pamela Anderson. She was blonder, made smarter choices, and was more famous than me. What little sense of self-worth I had evaporated, and all that was left for me was drugs.
I stayed with various friends, tried to get myself back on track, and jumped on and off the wagon. Taylar kept coming back and forth from Baton Rouge. She was maybe four years old. One time she wanted to go swimming at the pool where we were crashing, and I had been awake for a few days. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, Taylar was reaching into the water with her hand, with nobody supervising her. A vision flashed before me of her falling in and drowning while I slept. Had I not woken up at that very moment, who knows what could have happened? I beat myself up about it, vowed never to let her down again. I knew I couldn’t keep that promise if I was using drugs—but I couldn’t seem to stop.
I was in so much pain, I spent days in bed in the fetal position, crying and doing drugs. I tried antidepressants, but nothing worked. I could not fucking escape Tommy and Pammy, who were everywhere in the press. I had to feel the pain publicly and daily, and I couldn’t function.
My mom said, “Get over it, he wasn’t good for you,” and I wished it were that easy.
Tommy and Pamela seemed to milk every photo opportunity they could. It was sickening, like they were forcing me to feel my failure every single day. The only way I could get out of my own head and escape the feelings of shame and humiliation was to get high. Finally, I understood what Jani and my father had gone through. Why they did the things they did. Why addiction is far more complicated than we’re told, and how it’s an expression of a lack of love for ourselves.
My weight dropped to ninety pounds when I was at my worst. I was partying, going out, and sleeping and eating only twice a week because I had to. I was falling asleep on modeling jobs and sending Taylar to Baton Rouge every few months because I couldn’t cope, and then I was going to visit her and not being allowed to step foot in the house by my mom.
“I want to be with my daughter,” I’d scream.
My mom would grit her teeth and say no. “You’re staying at your dad’s until you get your shit together.” Before long, I made my mom Taylar’s registered legal guardian.
Within a year of ending things with Tommy, I was a single mother with a drug problem and no home of my own. I wasn’t able to take care of myself, much less my child. When Taylar was in LA she’d be on the couch or sharing a blow-up bed with me on the floor of a friend’s house.
Taylar was in the eighth grade and was fourteen years old when she started living with my mom in Baton Rouge permanently. My two stepfathers, Mr. Earl and then Mr. Billy (aka William Williamson), also helped raise my daughter and loved her as if she was their own. When she misbehaved, my mother would say things to her like, “I’m going to send you back to live with your mom on couches if you don’t get it together.” It’s sickening to think about. Even so, Taylar never, ever made me feel guilty about the choices I’d made.
There were many times over the years when I called my mom saying, “I just want to move home and be with my daughter.”
But my mom wasn’t prepared to disrupt Taylar’s life unless I could prove I was ready to be a responsible adult. “You can’t come home unless you have fifty grand in the bank and are able to take care of her.”
So, from a distance, I tried to teach Taylar to be a strong woman. To not make the same mistakes I did. To be confident, have a voice, and not let anybody put her under their thumb or ever treat her like she’s second best—things that I allowed to happen to me.
One day, I finally went off drugs cold turkey. I slept for five days straight. I woke up clean, and all I could think about was how I wanted to make it up to Taylar. I wanted to be able to support myself and my kid. Then I’d have a little bit of downtime, and someone would offer me something, and I’d think to myself, “I’ll be fine. I have it under control,” which is the biggest lie an addict can tell themselves. Over and over again, I found myself back at square one. By the time I put drugs behind me, Taylar was already a woman.
Jani, for his part, spent the rest of his life punishing himself, his bandmates, and anyone who loved him. His demons clawed away at him until on August 11, 2011, he was found dead of acute alcohol poisoning at a Comfort Inn hotel room in Woodland Hills, California. He was forty-seven years old.
•••
All those years watching her parents self-destruct took their toll on Taylar. As a teenager, she cut herself. Later, she started drinking—and heavily. For a while, we were terrified that she was following the same path taken by her father, whom she resembled so much in looks and in temperament now as well. But when Jani died, she was released. She stopped hurting herself. She started to talk about how she felt. She’d always written poems and stories, but for the very first time, she started to write poems about her father. Like this one:
Requiem for My Father
by Taylar Jayne Lane
I.
I wish I could have been
at the beach that day.
Not as your daughter,
but as a stranger
standing by.
It would have looked so beautiful
from far away,
without the film of tears
clouding
my eyes.
But there is life
after death.
It takes not the shape
of angels, nor does it haunt
my unlit bedroom
like a ghost,
dressed in whatever clothes
you died in.
Instead, it enters
like a lightness
and it settles
in my bones.
II.
Your music lives inside me,
plays my veins with quick
fingers, like a
whorehouse piano man.
I float up
through your pale hair
like morning dew
ascends
to meet the rising sun.
And your sadness makes its home
in me, heavy
as an anchor,
sinking through me
like a stone.
III.
We spread between us
like a blanket
distance, at what cost?
So often we forget
to search for what
is not yet lost.
Before, if we had wanted
to, we might have spanned
the gap.
But now there lies
between us lands and rivers,
ever distant, which
no living soul can cross.
An army of the fatherless
stretches further than my eye
can see;
a flood
of mourning daughters
from the landscape carve
deep valleys with their tears.
With one eye, do you see beyond
the moss of death
to the vast deserts
of Truth?
With the other,
do you see
me?
Does it bring you
peace—that sweet
lightning—
when you behold,
in my verdant
fields, the weeds
and flowers of yourself?
IV.
I received no invitation
to your immolation,
but I will carry
in my heart the smoke
of your memory,
and the ashes
of what can never be,
but might have been.
V.
How sad it is to see
the dissolution of
a day.
How tragic that we fill
our hearts with names
that death can take
away.
The ocean pulled you
to it like the tide,
and left me lonely
on the shore.
I saw you, but only
for a moment,
as the great silence
fell once more.
A few years ago, after her father’s death, the floodgates opened. Taylar and I finally talked about her childhood. About how I wasn’t there. About my desire to make it in LA, and how that mission that had cost us both so much. If I could go back and change my lifelong dream to “make it,” I would. You can’t get back lost time with your child. That’s why I am such an obsessive aunt to my brother’s baby. I dote on the little lobster the way I wish I had doted on Taylar. I missed my baby’s childhood.
When Father’s Day comes around, Taylar and I don’t really talk about it. Maybe I’ll send her a message saying, “How are you today?” and she’ll write back, “Fine, how are you?” Before my own father died, I was emotionally hard. I rarely cried. Now I cry at everything, all the time, every single day. I cry about my nephew, about my brother, about my mother, about everything. And I cry about my daughter, a lot. But all I have to do is hear her voice and the crying stops. At least for a while. All I have to do is eat ice cream and I’m reminded of Taylar. Cool, sweet, lovely, and full of soul. With a cherry on top. That’s my girl.
The Dickening
It was another one-hundred-degree day in the East Valley, and I was rehearsing my set as Nupa watched me lazily from the couch. I had two fans on full blast, and as I stood in front of the full-length mirror with my bleach blonde hair blowing in the air, it occurred to me that I looked a lot like myself from the nineties. I could have been auditioning for a hair metal video, except now I had a few extra pounds and a dent in my head.
I assumed “comedy pose”—straight back, confident smile—and got to joking.
“People assume because I’m blonde and have big tits that I’m fucking stupid. I mean I was fucking stupid, but we broke up.”
Nupa winked at me. Next to that joke I made a note—okay.
“I recently figured out that if I’m attracted to you, it’s a good indication that you’re a sociopath. It feels good to be self-aware. It’s like halfway to healing, right?”
Meh. I crossed that one out and carried on.
“My ex and I had issues in the bedroom. Once during sex, he asked me to hurt him. So I said, ‘You’re never going to amount to anything, and I hate your new haircut.’”
I looked at Nupa. She was sound asleep.
“When I get lonely sometimes, I think about getting back together with him, but then I think I’d rather be reincarnated as an anal bead.”
Not bad.
“I once told him to make love to me like we’re in the movies, so he flips me over, comes all over my back, and screams his own name as loud as he can in my asshole. That’s when I realized we don’t watch the same movies.”
Something about screaming into assholes has always appealed to me. A subconscious cry for help in the eternal void, aka: the Bobbie Brown Story. I made a note next to that joke—good.
My phone glowed on the bed behind me, and even though I was supposed to be practicing, I picked it up to check my messages. Maybe it was Jamie throwing me some of his crumbs. Alas, no. It was a dating app message from a guy with no profile photo. Who the fuck goes on a dating app with no profile pic? I thought. I mean, if you’re afraid of your own fucking face, so am I.
That’s kind of funny. I wrote the thought down.
Faceless Dude was asking me for nudes, so I responded with my stock answer: a photo of my favorite flesh-toned MAC lipstick.
He immediately wrote back, “Would you consider getting your breasts enlarged?” followed by a fairly lengthy description of how he liked to snort Viagra because of the way it knocks his dick out of his shorts. “I’ll let you take the full six inches if you can handle it,” he wrote. This guy was so douchey it was almost entertaining.
“Sure. May I also suggest an aggressive banana-eating contest with full eye contact?” I wrote, adding, “The winner gets to yell his name into my butthole.”
My phone flashed again. This time it wasn’t Faceless Dude. It was Jamie Kennedy.
“Hey, Bob. So yeah, I was thinking…do you wanna be a guest on my podcast? It’ll only be an hour…unless we go down the rabbit hole of course.”
This was no breadcrumb. This was a three-foot baguette. An invitation to sit face-to-face and confront our feelings in front of a couple hundred thousand of our closest friends.
A few days later, I found myself sitting in Jamie’s studio, facing him, ready to go down whatever hole he wanted. He was behind his desk and talking into his mic, a copy of Dirty Rocker Boys on his desk. He was cute, and as always, his energy was a little guarded. I could not figure this guy out at all. I was dressed power-lunch casual, wanting to appear smart yet demure. By the end of the show, I wanted Jamie to understand that I was not just a demanding bulldog who texts too much and tells jokes about farting on men’s balls.
I mean, that is me—but there’
s so much more.
“Ladies and gentleman, Bobbie Brown,” Jamie said into the mic, adding, “not the singer—the other one.”
My whole life, there have been too many Bobbie Browns. At castings, people often say, “Oh, my God, I’m wearing your lip liner!” to which I respond, “If I was a millionaire makeup mogul, do you really think I’d be auditioning for a Windex commercial?”
Then there’s the R&B singer Bobbie Brown, whom I met in the nineties club scene. I’ll never forget how his eyes lit up when I told him I was named after my dad. Months later, he conceived his own daughter with Whitney Houston (RIP) and named her Bobbi Kristina Brown (RIP), which added to the growing list of Bobbie Browns more famous than me. The most recent is Millie Bobbie Brown, who plays Eleven, the kid with the shaved head in Stranger Things. She’s all over the Internet, all the time, and I get all of her Google alerts. It drives me nuts.
“So, are you nervous?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah. A little bit.”
“Why are you nervous?”
“I don’t know…I’m all ballsy and talky and whatever, and then when it comes down to it, I’m like…you know?”
Great answer, Bobbie.
“So, you’re all talk no action?” he teased.
“Yeah. I mean. Totally, I’m normal.”
“You’re normal?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, totally. I’m normal.” I nodded, cleared my throat. There was a tickle in it. I needed some gum. Water. A gun would be great.
“You’re normal?”
“Yeah, I’m a normal person.”
I pulled out my vape pen, took a drag.
“Is that weed?” asked Jamie.
“No.”
“Regular smoking?”
“Yeah.”
“What’re you addicted to, nicotine?
“Yes.”
“How long you been addicted?”
“Since I was in my twenties. But I quit smoking.”
“Ever tried coke?”