Dirty Rocker Boys (2 page)

“So, Bobbie, do you have any diseases?”

Oh.

The question dropped like ice water on my head. I hadn’t really thought about it. I’d come of age on the Sunset Strip, which was basically a glorified STD factory. No one in the rock scene wore condoms.
No one.
Had I been tested? Of course not. Nothing
seemed
too diseased down there, but I hadn’t thought to ask a doctor to check me out. On the Strip, when it came to bodily juices, sharing was caring.

“Also, Bobbie, what about gonorrhea? Have you been tested for that? And when you suck my dick, can you do it with a condom on?”
Gah, he’s so PC,
I thought.

Truth be told, I could hardly blame Leo for feeling the safe-sex vibe with me. Tommy Lee was one of the biggest man-whore stripper chasers on the Strip. But I had never sucked anyone’s wiener with a condom on it before.
Oh well, first time for everything
.

Leo rolled a rubber on, lay back, and closed his eyes. My cue to get started. I kissed his belly and drew him close to me. I began to lick and kiss his gargantuan penis. I tried to put it in my mouth. I could barely breathe. My jaw locked; my eyeballs bulged. So I went back to licking it. Unfortunately, the latex tasted like the inside of a balloon, bitter, reminiscent of trips to
the dentist. I rode my tongue up and down, trying to ignore the acrid taste, but after a few minutes, I had to stop. The flavor, along with his spectacular girthyness, was making me gag.

“Leo, I’m sorry but this condom tastes terrible. I don’t think I can do it.” Leo pulled me down next to him and kissed me sweetly. “You’re right, that does taste kinda funny.” I pulled him on top of me. His eyes stayed open, gazing into mine. His brow furrowed a little as he eased himself into me. I inhaled sharply—he was . . .
titanic
.

“Wow, Leo, that’s nice, really nice.” Waves of satisfaction rippled through my body. I pulled Leo deeper into me, as deep as he could go. Revenge was sweeter than I could have imagined. If only Tommy Lee could see me now.

“Wait. Wait a second. Don’t move, Bobbie,” whispered Leo.

“What’s wrong?”

“We need to slow down.”

“Um, okay.”

We were about one minute into the lovemaking. I waited a few beats. I pulled him close again and he squeaked.

“No, no, not yet.”

I looked at Leo’s perfect face as he grimaced, hoping to make it past the two-minute mark. He was a unicorn. Rare, innocent, and horny. Me, on the other hand, I’d been engaged, married, and had given birth. I needed a man, not a man-child.

Ah what’s the point?

“I’m going to get a drink,” I said, pushing him off me, climbing
down out of the bed, throwing on a T-shirt. I was mad at him, mad at the whole world. The speed was making me antsy, bitchy, and annoyed with the handsome young golden boy for making me feel like a pedophile. Heading down the stairs, I yelled over my shoulder. “Maybe you should take your socks off next time.” Leo seemed confused. “Okay . . . can you make me a drink too?”

“How about a glass of milk?”

I went downstairs and hung out by myself, watching TV. I just wanted him gone. “Bobbie? Are you coming back?” I heard him call from my bedroom.

“Nah.”

Leo, at his tender age, had yet to learn how to recognize damaged goods. How was he to know he was just one in a series of revenge fucks? A little confused by my behavior, Leo got up, got dressed, and left.

A few months later, I did an interview on the radio in which I mentioned Leo’s extraordinary penis. Leo, apparently, didn’t see the funny side. He sent his best friend Kevin Connolly, who you might have seen on
Entourage
and in the movie
He’s Just Not That Into You
, over to talk to me. Kevin was a mutual friend of ours who I talked to on the phone occasionally, and who had also asked me out a few times. Today, though, he was visiting on “official business.”

“Yeah, so Leo heard about that interview you did,” said Kevin. “He’s really pissed off that you would talk about something personal on-air.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, stifling my laughter. I couldn’t imagine Tommy ever getting mad about the world knowing what a huge penis he has. But then, Leo wasn’t a cock-rock musician. For all his playfulness, he was a serious kid. I never heard from him again. Which was fine by me.

Next!

A few weeks later, the actor Stephen Dorff sidled up to me on the dance floor at Grand Ville, with an entourage of about six dudes.
Wow, he really thinks he’s the shit.
I towered over him in my heels and had to bend down to hear what he was saying.

“So, you wanna go back to my house and fuck?” said Stephen, in my ear. No hello, no “how are you?” Just straight to business.

“Excuse me?”

He leaned in a little closer, and I could feel his spit on my cheek.

“Do you want to go back to my place?”

You picked the wrong ice queen
,
motherfucker,
I thought. I hit him with the most withering up-and-down stare I could muster and proceeded to tear him a new one.

“Well, first of all, you’re short. Second of all, you’re fat. And third of all, you have a fucking unibrow.” I made a unibrow above my nose with two fingers, to illustrate. “Oh, and you’re spitting on me. Can you back the fuck up? Yeah, get out of here, chubby.”

Damn
. After all these years of being fun, goofy Bobbie Brown, unleashing my inner asshole felt
good
. Damn the
consequences—these guys had it coming. Thanks to the heart-numbing properties of the speed I was on, I had no mercy. Stephen turned to his entourage, stunned. “Come on, guys, let’s go.” Sharise, who had seen the whole encounter, was about to die of laughter. “What a dork!” she giggled. Fresh off her divorce from Vince, she was as disillusioned with men as I was. “Let’s show those assholes,” I said.

Next stop, Kevin Costner’s house. I looked around the party—five guys and about a hundred girls. I wandered through the house and peered into a bedroom. Kevin was sitting on the bed, encircled by females.
Oh, please,
I thought.

“Come on in,” he said, smiling.

I sat down on the bed. The girl sitting next to me put her legs around her neck. One leg, and then the other.

“This one’s a sure thing,” I said, rolling my eyes. Kevin seemed amused. “You’re funny,” he said. He asked me for my number, and as I jotted down my digits on a napkin, I giggled privately.
Mwa-ha-ha-ha
. If only Kevin knew what he was about to get himself into. He called me the next night. “Hey, Bobbie, are you in front of your TV? Check out channel five.” I put it on.
Dances with Wolves
. “Well, hi . . . there you are.” My eyes rolled deep into the back of my head.

“You girls should come to a party in Malibu this weekend. There will be music and dancing. You’ll love it.” I wasn’t sure I could be bothered. Kevin’s over-earnest egotism was turning me off, but Sharise wanted to go.
Ah, fuck it
. Ready for a good time,
we made the hour’s drive to Malibu from her house in the Valley, singing Sheryl Crow songs all the way.

Malibu’s twenty-seven-mile stretch of sun-drenched coastline is home to Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg, Courteney Cox, and dotted with glassy million-dollar homes that stare out at the surf. But behind the elegant façades lies the same hedonistic, morally bankrupt scene you’ll find in Hollywood—guys in Ferraris, strung-out Bel Air wives, rockers in cowboy boots, dust clouds of cocaine in their wake.
Idiots
, I thought, taking a quick key bump of speed in the car. I
hated
coke. Coke was for losers.

Sharise and I walked into the party and headed straight for the dance floor. The DJ was spinning some rad hip-hop, and thanks to the speed, I had plenty of energy. I tuned into the rhythm, oblivious to the curious gazes of the other partygoers as Sharise and I busted out our raddest ’90s dance moves, pop-locking, voguing, and doing the Running Man like it was going out of style (which it was). Then I felt something behind me; it was Kevin, dancing up to me, awkward mating ritual in full effect. Imagine someone being led by his penis in a pelvic thrust, off the beat, headed in your direction. Instinctively, I shoved him with both arms across the dance floor.

“Whoa,” said Kevin, stumbling. Undeterred, he came back at me with that pelvis.

“Why don’t you go dance somewhere else?” I sniped.

Sharise told me to stop being a bitch. I’ll admit, I was kind
of an asshole back in those days. I was not impressed by anybody or anything, no matter how many Oscars or Grammys they might have. Which always seemed to make them come on stronger. Sharise begged me to please just be nice to Kevin—she was always a tad more compassionate and polite than I—so when he invited us over to his house to watch a movie the following night, I gave it one more shot.

Kevin opened the door, wearing a country-western-type outfit: blue jeans and a plaid shirt. He had a beautiful Spanish-style home in the Hollywood Hills that he had bought from Richard Dreyfuss.

“Hello, girls.”

Within moments of arriving I managed to smash my glass of vodka tonic on the tile floor. I was notoriously clumsy, always tripping, crashing, breaking things, possessed by inexplicable involuntary spasms. I was embarrassed, so I grabbed Sharise’s glass and threw it on the floor too.

“It’s a Greek restaurant! O-pa!”

“No, it’s not a Greek restaurant, Bobbie,” said Kevin, dryly.
Ugh, what a bore,
I thought.

“Whatever.”

I was more off-kilter than usual, having been up all night partying with the guys from Coal Chamber. Pierced nü-metal
goth kids in black eyeliner, they were my kind of people, with my kind of taste in vices. Normally, I found it easy to hop between the rock scene and glitzy Hollywood shit, but the night I showed up at Kevin’s tastefully appointed home, my brain was clearly still in heavy metal parking lot mode.

Turning a blind eye to the shards of Waterford crystal on the floor tile, Kevin suggested we retire to the film-viewing room, where he had a movie cued up for us to watch. I stepped into the viewing room, looking back over my shoulder to say something to Sharise, failing to notice the rather large step in front of me. I went flying, landing face-first on the ground. Man, why was this always happening to me?

“
Face-plant!
” I yelled, chewing on a mouthful of freshly shampooed carpet.

For Kevin, the horror of my dangerous one-woman freak show was starting to sink in. He looked nervous. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” hissed Sharise.

We sat down on the wraparound banquette in his screening room and Kevin put on the movie.
EDtv.
I tried to relax and act like a normal human being, but something about the way Woody Harrelson delivered his lines was really pissing me off. He kept stuttering and blinking his eyes. “Fuck!” I exclaimed at the top of my voice, in full Tourette’s mode, not realizing I was thinking out loud.

“What?”

“The fuck? He did it again. This is ridiculous.”

“What’s the matter?” said Kevin, pausing the film.

“I-I-I don’t know, K-K-Kevin.” I imitated Woody, stuttering and blinking my eyes. Kevin looked at me blankly.

“Woody Harrelson keeps stuttering every time he delivers. It’s pissing me off.”

“Can’t you maybe ignore it?”

“No.”

“Please just shut up, Bobbie,” said Sharise. Kevin put the movie back on. In the very next scene, Woody Harrelson stuttered and blinked. Again.

“Oh. You’re right,” said Kevin, sounding irritated. “I can’t watch the movie now. Perhaps we should just turn it off.” Sharise, ever the peacemaker, convinced him it would be okay to carry on watching, so long as we tried not to focus too much on Woody’s tics. I couldn’t be bothered and drifted into a deep, twitchy sleep, for the first time in days. The speed was starting to wear off.

“Wake up, Bobbie! The movie’s over,” said Sharise. I was hanging off the couch sideways, a little drool dangling from my lips.

“Let’s all go upstairs for a nightcap, shall we?” said Kevin, in one last desperate bid to rescue the evening. “There’s a magnificent view of the city from my bedroom.” Kudos to Kevin for not kicking me out. Seriously. Hats off. I guess he must have really wanted to get laid. He led the way up to his bedroom, which, as promised, had an enormous deck overlooking the whole of Hollywood. I stepped out on to it, inhaling the heady scent of eucalyptus and orange blossom, mesmerized by the snaking glow
of the freeways in the distance. The balcony railing was only crotch-high, and as I leaned over, I half stumbled and gasped, holding on tight to make sure I didn’t flip over and tumble down the hillside below.

“Whoa, kind of dangerous over here!” I yelled at Kevin and Sharise, who were ignoring me. Since Tommy had left me, I’d been on a string of dates, most of them calamitous, or hilarious. Something inside me had become resistant to all that was sane and decent in this world. I was a chaos magnet, a bad-luck charm, a catastrophe in kitten heels. Sharise, too, had suffered her fair share of rock-wife damage, but, unlike me, she could keep it together in public.

“Maybe you should go inside—you’re making me nervous,” called over Kevin.

“Okay, but I want a cigarette,” I said, strolling into the bedroom. I lit up my Marlboro and looked around. The room was huge, shaped like an octagon, with a giant fireplace illuminating one of the walls.

“No smoking inside,” I heard Kevin call from the balcony.

“Bob, he said no smoking,” Sharise hollered.

“All right, all right,” I said, taking one last pull on my cigarette.
Where do I put the fucker out?
I thought, eyes searching for an ashtray.

I flipped the cigarette toward the crackling fire—
fliiiiick
—and walked back toward the balcony, trying to join in the conversation. Moments later, Kevin’s expression shifted. He pointed behind me, shaking his head, panic in his eyes.

“My bedroom’s on fire.”