Dirty Rocker Boys (3 page)

I turned around, and indeed, flames were crawling up the wall from the mantel above the fireplace, where my cigarette had landed.

“Holy shit!” I ran into the bedroom, took off my jacket, and slapped it against the wall, trying to put out the flames. Sparks exploded like it was the Fourth of July.

“Dude, stop fanning the flames! You’re making it worse!” Sharise hissed.

“I am
so
sorry, Kevin!” I said, determined to put out the blaze. I took off my scarf and slapped at the wall. Even after the fire went out, I carried on slapping and thrashing, grunting like a tennis player as I gave the wall a good beating. Kevin’s face was stricken.

“Will you fucking calm down,” yelled Sharise. I turned to my friend, annoyed at her constant chiding, and tried to whip-slap her in the face with the tail end of my burnt-up scarf. Except I missed and ended up slapping Kevin in the eyeball instead. On the snapback, it ricocheted into my face.

“Jesus! Ouch!”

“Fuck! Sorry, Kevin!”

I was squinting. Kevin’s face was sooty, and he was cupping one eye. His fancy mantelpiece was charred and ashy. Sharise’s jaw, as it so often was when we hung out, was on the ground.

“Bobbie, where on God’s Earth did you come from?” said Kevin, shaking his head.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1968

According to family lore, it was stickier than molasses the day my dad told my mom she was the finest piece of ass in the South, prompting my mom to fling the contents of her ice cream soda in his face. “Maybe this’ll cool you down!” she yelled, and my dad cracked a smile, squinting through the root beer blur.
My kinda girl,
he thought, licking his lips. It was the first time Bobby Gene Brown and Judy Ann Faul had met, and frankly, with the heat, a little ice cream soda in the face was not entirely unrefreshing. Bobby eyed Judy up and down—she was seventeen and a half, with cat-eye makeup and jet-black hair, just like Priscilla Presley. He wiped down his leather jacket with a napkin and watched my mother storm out of the diner, picturing her in a leopard-print bikini.

“She’s gonna be my wife,” he said to the cashier, who shook his head.

Three months later, they were married.

Bobby was nine years older than Judy, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks kind of guy, a diamond in the rough with dark hair, full
lips, and blue eyes. He grew up in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a quaint Southern backwater founded by French fur trappers and pioneers, and dotted with church steeples and apple orchards. Straight out of school he enlisted in the military but never served. He decided to become a car salesman, and let’s just say, whatever the clichés are about a man who sells used cars, they’re pretty much true, especially when it came to my daddy. He had the gift of gab and was smooth enough to talk a good Catholic girl like my mom into giving a guy like him the time of day.

My mom, Judy, grew up in a Catholic family in a small swampy town named Church Point, Louisiana, so-called Cajun Music Capital of the World. She was one of six, raised by a single mother, third from the youngest. She was born sick, with spinal meningitis, so my grandma Isabelle used to make her wear a braid necklace that had been dipped in holy water, to make her get well. I don’t know if it was Jesus or just good fortune that did it, but my mother did grow into a healthy, beautiful teenager.

My grandpa had walked out on my grandma when all their children were kids, so my grandma raised the six of them on her own. With such a big family, the children had to go out to work early—when she was thirteen, my mom lied about her age to get a job at a store called Shoe Town. With so little money in the family, she had to grow up quick.

*  *  *

When Bobby Brown started showing up at the house with big bags of groceries, Judy and Isabelle liked that. Money was
tight, and groceries were always welcome. They were then living in Baton Rouge, capital of Louisiana, the quiet cousin of New Orleans. It’s nice and simple there, and so are the people.

“Miss Judy, Miss Isabelle . . . I saw some wonderfully fresh meats at the store today. I couldn’t help thinking you might want some for your sandwiches.”

“Bless your heart,” said my grandma, eyeing the grocery bags, handing my mother a cigarette, and mouthing,
I like him
.

When Bobby choked Judy in a jealous rage during one of their first dates, Judy assumed his actions were a sign of his passion for her. After three months of dating, they married. A year later, on October 7, 1969, I was born, following a grueling twenty-six-hour labor. “You were a bitch coming into this world, and you still are,” my mom likes to joke. “Let’s call her Bobbie Jean,” said my mom proudly, cradling me in her arms in the delivery room. She was eighteen. My dad liked that—Bobby Gene Brown’s firstborn child would be named Bobbie Jean Brown, after him.

We lived in a house on Pioneer Drive, in the Park Forest subdivision of Baton Rouge. It was a quaint little neighborhood, with a community pool where all the kids would ride their bikes and go swimming in the summertime. I enrolled at the elementary school down the street, Park Forest Elementary, and played hopscotch with all the neighbors’ kids. From the outside, life looked pretty sweet.

My mom always wanted me to be pretty. She imagined me as a princess or a Southern debutante, and was always fixing
my hair, pulling it into a tight ponytail or putting it in rollers before bed. (Years later she would do the same to my baby daughter, who, unlike me, loved it.) I hated having to sleep with a million sponge rollers attached to my scalp, but so long as I had nice hair for school, my mom was happy, so that was that. When I was in fifth grade, my mom started taking me to White Gloves and Party Manners classes, kind of a finishing school for kids where you learn about good hygiene, table manners, phone etiquette, and so on. Underneath the Southern curls and the lace dresses, I was a goofy tomboy, but I learned at a young age where to place a napkin on the table, in what order the forks, spoons, and knives went, how to correctly get in and out of a car, even how to walk a catwalk—“the essentials of being a true and proper lady,” my mother said. “We may be broke, but we don’t need to act like it,” she said. The older I got, the more I rebelled against all that. I would do everything in my power
not
to look perfect—to scuff my shoes and dirty my cheeks. I broke the rules because the reality behind our white picket fence didn’t match the façade.

Now, I
loved
my daddy, Bobby Brown. But truth be told, he was an angry motherfucker. My mom always tried to shield me from it, but it was obvious that Bobby had some ugly rage that festered deep inside. I must have been five years old the first time I decided to step in. Bobby was getting Judy really bad, kicking her on the floor. So I grabbed a bottle of ketchup, lay down, and squirted the red stuff all over my belly, so as to create a diversion.

“Look over here, Daddy, I’m hurt. You must get help.”

Bobby cocked his head to one side. “You better get out of here, Bobbie,” he growled. “Yes, get out!” my mom screamed. I wasn’t sure who was more mad at me, my dad or my mom. She really hated my seeing her like that.

Judy tried to leave Bobby numerous times. She would pack a few suitcases and we would go stay at a hotel, but my dad would show up looking all lonesome and sorry for himself and convince us to come home. He just had this way with words, the ability to make you fall in love with him all over again, no matter what he had just done. Things would get good for a while, and our little house on Pioneer Drive would be filled with music. My daddy played the guitar, mandolin, and harmonica; once upon a time, he even had dreams of being a country singer. A lot of blues and country singers came from his hometown of Spartanburg—Pink Anderson (inspiration for the Pink in Pink Floyd), David Ball, and Walter Hyatt, for instance. When I was little, I would sit up with him late and listen to him strum on his guitar. Those were my favorite times with him. Sometimes my dad would perform in a little bar close to where we lived. When he wasn’t performing at the bar, he’d be drinking it dry.

Bobby didn’t drink much at home, but he loved to go out and party, and when he came stumbling onto the front porch, that’s when the fun and games began. I could hear them in their bedroom, my mom yelling at him to stop. After a while Mom would have me sleep in bed with her, hoping perhaps that I
could act as a safety barrier. But it didn’t work. Bobby Brown couldn’t help himself—a trait that ran in his family.

“Bobbie, honey, wake up.”

It was the night of my seventh birthday and I had fallen asleep hours ago, high on cake and soda pop. I opened my eyes and blinked, trying to make sense of what was happening. My mom was leaning over me, stroking my hair.

“Grandpa John just went to heaven; now we gotta take him to the funeral home. You have to get up, sweetie.”

Grandpa John was my dad’s dad. I was his favorite, the only kid he really liked out of all his children and his children’s children. In fact, I may have been the only human being he liked, period. Grandpa John grumbled, growled, and complained, and had beaten up his poor wife, my grandma Ida, like it was his daily duty. A sweet, mild-mannered woman, she had died before I was born, after suffering a brain hemorrhage. My dad was a teenager at the time of her death.

“The heat was on high in the house when I came home,” my dad told me, when I was in my twenties. “That’s when I knew something was wrong.” On a hot Southern day he found my grandma lying on the couch with the heating turned on high. He thought she was sleeping, but she was dead.

My dad remained loyal to my grandpa, though, and when Grandpa John got sick in 1975, he moved in with us. I was six years old and tried my hardest to be a good nurse for him. I would steal pink geraniums and pansies from the neighbor’s garden, tie them in a posy, and lay them on his bedside table.
“That’s my Pickle,” said my grandpa, patting my head, ignoring the neighbor in his yard, hollering about his missing flowers. Grandpa John loved to call me Pickle.

We drove eleven hours to Grandpa’s funeral in Spartanburg. That was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry. I cried too. Grandpa John was the only grandpa I ever knew, and I loved him. The last piece of advice Grandpa gave my mom before he died was, “Give him a son.” He figured that if my mom bore Bobby a boy, that might help lift his mood. And so when I was eight, my mom gave birth to my brother, John Adam Brown, the sweetest little baby on Earth. As for my dad? Well he stayed grumpy, except maybe a little worse. Now I had a baby to worry about, as well as my mom. Usually when things got bad, I would lift baby John out of his crib (we soon started calling him by his middle name, Adam) and we’d hide in the closet. I’d hold him close to me and sing songs until things got quiet again.

Things worsened when my dad quit being a car salesman and started his home-insulation business. Being around chemicals and fiberglass all day long made him tired and irritable. On top of that, he had trouble figuring out how to make money, hard as he tried. Add a hangover every morning, and you’ve got one mean, pissed-off son of a bitch. Life with the Browns was never a rose garden.

The one thing that always cheered me up, apart from playing with my baby brother, was my girlfriends. I learned early on that when family lets you down, your best friends can pull you back up. My BFF Missy Brown lived down the street. My other best friend was Shannon Parker, who lived next to Missy. Then my two other besties, Jenny Mizel and Kelly Winters, lived within walking distance. We were inseparable, like the Pink Ladies from the movie
Grease
, and we loved nothing more than putting on makeup, gossiping about boys, and making up dances to our favorite pop songs. Jenny and I, especially, were into the dancing. As soon as I could walk, I would groove. I stuffed socks into my mom’s bras and boogied with the vacuum cleaner while watching
Soul Train
.

“Look, honey, she really loves that black music,” said my dad. To this day, hip-hop is my jam.

I was shy in middle school, but once I started dancing at our school talent shows, that changed. When my mom found out, the stage mom that had resided inside her for so long was finally unleashed.

“Okay, let’s do it one more time,” my mom would say, as Jenny and I practiced our ’80s dance moves. We had picked the song “Funkytown” for the sixth-grade talent show.

“A little more like this, Bobbie! And
smile
!”

Winning the talent shows boosted my confidence even more, and I started singing solo in front of the school. I never had an out-of-the-womb amazing voice like Christina Aguilera,
but I knew how to entertain a crowd. I’ll never forget my mom’s proud face after I sang “Over the Rainbow” in front of the whole school. That moment, I think, is when she realized she had an entertainer on her hands.

Along with my newfound confidence came a growing disregard for the rules. I became convinced that I knew better than most adults—and who could blame me, considering how my parents carried on with each other. Nothing was off-limits, as far as I was concerned, including stealing my mom’s car and kidnapping my baby brother. I blame my friend Penny’s older sister, who was eighteen. She was like a mentor to Penny and me. She taught us how to French kiss on our hands, how to make a boy think you were ignoring him, how to write a love letter, which lip gloss to wear, the importance of blending eye shadow, how much hair mousse to use, why dry shampoo mattered—the important stuff.

I was eleven years old, and so was Penny. Driving an automobile seemed doable. Penny’s sister gave us a pretty thorough lesson in her mom’s Thunderbird, and by the end of the day we were confident drivers, our little butts propped up on cushions so we could see over the steering wheel, feet barely reaching the pedals. Driving around the block, then pulling up against the curb and parking was a thrill. I’d never felt so grown-up in my life.

One day I thought it would be fun to take my toddler brother out for a spin. I found my mom’s car keys, carried him to the car, and sat him in the passenger seat. We drove about fifteen blocks
through the subdivision and then back. It was a glorious morning, and my three-year-old brother seemed perfectly at ease with his eleven-year-old chauffeur. Pulling up to the curb outside my parents’ house, I was met by an unwelcome sight—my mom in her bedroom slippers, smudged makeup around her eyes.