The Dirt (63 page)

Things only got worse when Pamela called home to tell her family the news. Her mother fucking flipped out and told her to file for divorce immediately while her brother asked for my address so he could come over and personally kick my ass. They basically disinherited her and refused to recognize our marriage. In the meantime, Bobbie had left twenty messages. She had heard on the news that Pamela and I were married, and she was pissed. As far as she was concerned, we were still going out.

A
t the bottom of the hill where the Pacific Coast Highway meets Kanan-Dume Road, my eyes unclouded and I had a moment of clarity. I screeched to a halt in front of the World Gym, threw open the door, and unloaded the gun into the stop sign there. I was still pissed, but I wasn’t stupid like O.J. I wasn’t going to let Brandi destroy my life any more than she already had.

I sat down by the side of the road and started crying. I couldn’t take it anymore. She was destroying me, and she was destroying the children. This new piece of expensively bought information made it impossible to continue to tolerate her shopping sprees and meanness around the house. I had to get away from her. I wanted so badly for Brandi and I to be everything that my parents never were, but it was impossible when my relationship had crumbled from beneath me.

When I confronted Brandi and asked for a divorce, our relationship turned from marriage to war, and she left the house threatening to take from me everything I owned and loved. I never realized how lonely the mansion could be. Not only was I now living by myself fighting for my children in a custody battle, but I wasn’t speaking to my mother and I didn’t know if my father was alive or dead. As for my band, the only real support system I had my whole life, they were a mess: Every day in the studio trying to make
Generation Swine
felt like an episode of
Dynasty
, with everybody plotting behind each other’s backs.

After I showed an engineer friend a song I had written at the height of my depression called “Song to Slit Your Wrists By,” he insisted I get out of the house. He started begging me to go out with a friend of his from Pasadena. “She’s an awesome girl,” he promised.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not really into dating right now. I just want to try and get my kids back.”

“Nikki, you need to go out with someone. Snap out of it. She’s a nice girl. You’ll like her.”

I caved in and called her. She seemed nice enough, so I invited her out for some food. It was so out of character with how I used to meet girls before I was married, when all I had to do was lean against the Sheetrock of the Starwood and look cool. The drive to her place in Pasadena took an hour and a half. I arrived, opened the door, and, sure enough, the bitch was cockeyed. Just like Angie Saxon’s old roommate. She looked like a drunk Geena Davis. As soon as I entered her Shabby Chic house, I wanted to turn and flee. This was not my style at all.

But I had driven all the way there, and she looked so desperate and expectant. So I took her someplace suitably pathetic like Chili’s. She kept pounding scotches, while I sat there watching because there was no way I was going to drive all the way home drunk. The more she guzzled, the louder and more obnoxious she became. Normally, I would have been just as drunk and loud, but sober I didn’t know how to deal with it. I just cowered and sank deeper into my chair.

I took her back to her place, and she pulled me inside and asked if I wanted to watch TV. I made an excuse, but she sat me down and flipped on Fox anyway. “This is my favorite show,” she said. It was
Cops
.

I sat as far away from her on the couch as I could. During a commercial, she scooted onto the middle cushion. After a few more minutes of silence, she asked, “Do you want anything?”

“Uh, I’ll have some water.”

When she returned from the kitchen, she sat even closer to me. I wanted to get out of there so badly that sweat started streaming down the sides of my face. She scooted closer. Finally, I spoke: “I have to go. I have a long drive.”

“You should stay and watch
Cops
,” she insisted. “This is a really good episode.”

“No, I really should be going. I have a long drive.”

I stood up and she jumped in front of me, all tall and cockeyed. I tried to walk around her, but she interposed herself between me and the door and puckered up her lips. I pulled back, but she only grew more aggressive. I needed to get out of there: a cockeyed Geena Davis was attacking me. I was going to kill my friend. I ran to my truck and peeled off, forgetting to even say good-bye or “I had fun, thanks.” A minute later, my cell phone rang. It was her. This was turning into a horror movie.

“Why’d you leave?” she asked.

“Well…”

“You can spend the night if you want. I will do anything you want. Anything.”

“No, I really can’t.”

“I will be your slave,” she said. “I will do you oh so right.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe some other time.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, you know. You’re, um, cockeyed.”

That was pretty much the extent of my blind-dating experience. I met a cockeyed Geena Davis, then I met a cockeyed Meg Ryan. But I slept with the cockeyed Meg Ryan.

Tommy had married Pamela Anderson, so he was feeling pretty high and mighty. “Dude, you gotta stop going out with those regular girls,” he told me. “You have to go out with somebody who understands you, who’s busy like you are, who goes through the kind of shit you do. You need someone famous. Look through a magazine: find someone interesting.”

I went to the newsstand and grabbed
Details
and
Premiere
. Drew Barrymore seemed kind of fun; Cindy Crawford was good arm candy; and Jenny McCarthy looked like a wild girl who could make me laugh in bed. I drew up a form letter and had Kovac fax a copy to each of their managers, oblivious to the fact that Jenny McCarthy was actually dating her manager. Not only did I not get a single response, but those letters would come back to haunt me.

While we were finishing the album in the studio, I saw a copy of
Playboy
sitting around with a photo of some
Baywatch
blonde in the back. I noticed that she was a pretty girl, but I didn’t think anything else about it. The next day, Tommy said, “Pam wants to introduce you to somebody.”

“Oh, no, who? Some cockeyed David Hasselhoff?”

“No, a girl she works with on
Baywatch
. And she’s hot, dude.”

I didn’t really want to go out with some narcissistic actress bimbo, so I tried to back out of it. Besides, Pamela never really liked me anyway, and when I tried to get her to make friends with Brandi, it was like mixing oil and water. However, Scott Humphrey intervened as usual and said that if I didn’t want to go on the date, he’d go. So I pulled seniority.

Cursing myself for giving in to another stupid blind date, I drove to the
Baywatch
set. I was standing in the background watching them film a scene around the lifeguard tower when a woman walked on set with beautiful blond hair and a flowered sarong. It was the woman I had seen in
Playboy
. “That’s her, dude,” Tommy nudged me.

“No way. That girl would never go out with me.” I pictured her being bored as I waffled through dinner about the work we were doing on
Generation Swine
. I was sure I’d get shot down, and I contemplated sneaking away to save myself the embarrassment. She was too wholesome and all-American for a dirty fucker like me.

After the shoot, I walked down the long dirt road to the beach and met her halfway, where Pam introduced us. Her name was Donna, and she couldn’t have been any less excited to meet me. She didn’t even look at me. She just nodded and walked to her trailer. I guess the last thing she wanted to do was get involved with a tattooed heroin-shooting womanizer with three kids who was clearly still on the rebound from a messy marriage.

I went back to Pam’s trailer and waited, wondering if it wasn’t too late to make my escape. Donna was clearly thinking the same thing, because she walked inside and said, “You know what? I can’t go. I don’t have anything to wear.”

All Donna had was a long, loose-fitting pajama top that she had worn to work. “Just wear that,” I said. “That’s fine.” She gave me a dirty look, left the trailer, and came back ten minutes later in the pajamas.

“Fine,” she said. “Fuck it. Let’s go.”

The blind date was already a disaster. Tommy and Pam led the way to the Dragonfly in their Suburban. I followed in my Suburban, and Donna brought up the rear in her Pathfinder. It was a stereotypical L.A. date—conducted by motorcade. I kept making sudden turns and racing through yellow lights, hoping she’d get lost. By the time we reached the Dragonfly, I couldn’t see her in the rearview mirror anymore. I was safe. But a minute after I got out of my car, she pulled up behind me. I was stuck.

We hung out on the patio and started talking. Afterward, we went to a club where everyone was fucked up and dancing. But we stayed sober and talked in a corner about music and about our kids. I was actually enjoying myself.

Around midnight, I drove her to her car. I was running out of things to say, so I told her about my house and the swimming pool I was building.

“Oh really, a pool?” she yawned, feigning interest.

“Yeah, and it’s going to be shaped like a pussy. I’ve always wanted a pussy-shaped swimming pool, so I can just … oh, never mind.”

She rolled her eyes, and I saw any chance that I might ever have with her fly out the window. I dropped her off at her car and was so embarrassed I didn’t even try to kiss her.

Back at my big, isolated house, however, I felt so lonely and empty that I called her. I wanted to spend some more time with her and see if she was really as cool as I thought. We made a date to go to a restaurant in Malibu called Bamboo the next night.

That morning, I took my kids to the Malibu Fair, where I ran into Tommy and Pamela. Pamela was carrying their son Brandon, and her face was red with anger. Tommy was drunk off his ass trailing behind her, and she was clearly pissed. I told her I was going to see Donna again, and she gave me a patronizing pat on the head.

I dropped the kids off at Brandi’s, changed into my only set of presentable clothes, and picked Donna up. Over a messy noodle dinner at Bamboo, I started having these feelings that were either genuine love or just rebound obsession. I wasn’t sure, especially after I had fallen for Brandi so quickly and so wrongly. I was too scared to look at Donna, because it made me nervous just seeing how beautiful she was. When she went to the bathroom, guys came up to the table to congratulate me for being with someone so hot. Twelve years ago, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But marriage had drained away all my self-esteem.

Unlike my cockeyed dates, with Donna, I wanted to take her out to the beach and talk to her all night. We had so much in common: We were both from small towns, we both loved children, and she was regarded by the world as this
Baywatch
sex symbol, while I guess I was seen as the same in rock and roll. But in our hearts we both knew that we were just nerds, total fucking high-school losers who had put on a good act and gotten lucky. Finally, I said to Donna, “Listen, I live just around the corner. Do you want to go to my house? I have some wine, we can kick back, and I can show you some lovely etchings of the pussy-shaped pool I’m building.”

“Okay, if it’s close,” she said.

“Sure, it’ll just take a minute.”

It was twenty-five miles away, and I knew it. She followed me in her Pathfinder up the Pacific Coast Highway to Kanan-Dume. As we wound our way into the hills, she signaled for me to pull over. “How far are we going?” she asked, exasperated.

“We’re almost there.”

I led her all the way through Westlake Village and North Ranch, hoping she wouldn’t get fed up and just turn around. Finally, we pulled into my driveway.

“What the fuck is this?” she asked when she saw my Richie Rich mansion.

She came in, sat on the ten-thousand-dollar couch Brandi made me buy, and started drinking wine. I was too speechless to drink: I couldn’t believe this beautiful girl was sitting on my couch in this house that I only associated with marriage, children, and the worst studio experience of my life. It seemed so wrong, yet I was enjoying it so much. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t even know where or how to begin because I hadn’t done it in so long. I was such a loser, a Frank Feranna Jr. Finally, like a true nerd, I asked, “Can I hug you?”