No, I wasn’t really seeing someone, I kind of just said that, I backpedaled. Hearing back from him was such a relief. Maybe we have a second chance here.
You’re a mess, Bobbie! A mind-fucking bitch! Fuck you!
Maybe not. I was stunned. I tried calling him, but he wouldn’t pick up. I kept calling him and calling him and he finally agreed to let me come over. He was so businesslike, it hurt.
“That wasn’t cool, Bobbie—you really hurt my feelings,” he said, matter of fact. “I don’t like you anymore. Why would you sleep with Jay like it didn’t even mean anything? That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”
“Dave, I don’t know what the fuck I was doing, I was trying to protect myself. You’re a famous rock star. . . . I really thought I just had to play it cool with you.”
Dave just shook his head.
“You’re not cool, you’re over-the-top, Bobbie. You act like yours is the only broken heart in the world.”
I had never imagined that any rock star guy could ever be capable of breaking it down like that. Especially not Dave Navarro. The whole seven months we were spending time together, I was caught up in how fucking cool he was, I didn’t realize he was, like me, just another fuck up trying to survive and maybe find some real love along the way.
“Listen, Bobbie, I don’t even know if we can hang out anymore. I’m sorry.”
I drove home, devastated. Guilty. Confused. It didn’t seem to matter what I did; I couldn’t help but fuck things up. Nobody fucking loves me, I thought, a bottomless well of self-pity. Through my tears, I scrolled through my phone, looking for Jay’s number.
Jay had been my friend for so long, I felt safe unloading all my rawness onto him. He had been pursuing me for so long, I assumed he must have been in love with me. All the truths I had been withholding from Dave I dumped straight onto Jay’s lap, assuming my open wounds were what he wanted. But Jay was not Dave.
Our decade of friendship, combined with the joy of my sexual reawakening and the transference of my feelings for Dave Navarro, blinded me to the fundamental incompatibilities of Jay Gordon and Bobbie Brown. Of which there were many.
1. We were an odd couple. He was a scene queen who plucked his eyebrows and wore cyber-goth platform boots, PVC, and latex; I was a blond mom who liked hip-hop, Ugg boots, and ’N Sync.
2. He was incapable of committing to one girl; I was used to being the center of every man’s attention.
3. He thought I was a big dork; I knew I was a big dork.
4. He wore more makeup than me, yet we couldn’t even share foundation—he preferred shades of alabaster, whereas I was always more California tan.
You couldn’t find two less compatible people. Until we were in bed.
Even though we saw each other nearly every day, Jay refused to refer to me as his girlfriend. Even after a year of being fuck buddies, I sensed that Jay would bail if I put any pressure on the relationship, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone. But I couldn’t hold back my feelings any longer. He was lying on my bed, and I stood next to it and tapped his shoulder.
“Jay, I love you.”
He turned and looked up at me, surprised.
“I’m telling you that because it’s how I feel, not because I’m expecting a specific answer back from you,” I said, nobly. “Whether or not you can say it back to me doesn’t affect how I feel.” And then I walked away, and my chest relaxed for the first time in months. Even if he can’t tell me he loves me, I know that he does, I thought.
Actually, I don’t know that Jay ever loved me. He might have said he did once or twice in the five years we would spend together, on and off. But in that moment he just nodded his head and smiled. “That’s cool.”
The days I couldn’t see him were torture, because I sensed he might be with another woman. My obsession grew. I found myself parking my car outside his studio to watch which girls would come in and out, confirming whatever lie I suspected Jay had just told me. Even when he was caught red-handed, he would never be honest, so I would default to believing him. It was easier to believe his bullshit than to accept that yet again, I was alone and addicted to a fantasy. I was convinced I could make him fall in love with me. After all the bullshit I had gone through, the least he could do was try to love me.
When I walked in on him in bed with another girl, it sparked my first panic attack. “Bobbie, get the fuck out of here,” he hissed, half-asleep. The girl next to him stirred a little. “And stop crying!” he whispered, pushing me out the door. I fell to the ground, hyperventilating.
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” I told my friend Dallas, who I had brought along with me. “Hush, honey, you’re having a panic attack,” she said, holding my hand. “Let’s get out of here and find you someplace quiet to lie down.” She, along with all my friends, couldn’t believe it when I took Jay back, time and again.
Jay had invited me to meet up with him on tour. A psychic had told me not to go, but I ignored her advice and went anyway. Big mistake. We both partied, and after three days of being awake, I was so fucking tired and emotional. We were in San Francisco, and I just wanted to curl up and get some alone time with Jay. But he decided to throw a full-blown after-party in our hotel room instead. There was this girl and that girl and my nerves were so fried by this point, I started to give him attitude. I couldn’t believe that my lover, and my friend for so many years, was treating me like just another groupie, in front of everyone. “What’s your fucking problem, Bobbie?” he screamed. I was dumbfounded. Jay told me to get on a plane and get the fuck out of there. In the wee hours, not having slept for three days and bawling my eyes out, I made my way to the airport, found a flight, and cried my way home. Jay and I didn’t speak for a year. That entire time, my spun mind still obsessed over him, plotting ways to win him back.
I remembered explaining to Jay, back when I had just broken up with Tommy, how sex between friends really does change everything. I was right. Once you get strung out on your dick, it’s over. Done. We’re conquered. When I’m with someone, I flatter him, make him feel special, like he’s ten men, even if he’s not. And that is a mistake, by the way. Do not do that, ladies. Don’t ever let him know that he is completely satisfying you, because as soon as you do, it’s over. That’s what I have learned, every single time. Hey, I am forty-three, and I am just figuring this out.
I should have just listened to Taylar. She hated Jay. She thought he looked like a cross between Frankenstein and Edward Scissorhands, and was embarrassed to be seen with him. Whenever he tried to talk to her, she would roll her eyes and say, “Ugh.” When we asked her to give us some privacy, she would curl up in a ball and refuse to leave the room. One time Jay dropped her off at school for me and she was mortified. “Mom, why did you do that to me? He looks like Frankenscissors and his hair is like a burnt match. Don’t ever do that to me again!” When he came over to the house wearing his super-high goth platform shoes, with his spiky black-and-white hair and shaved eyebrows, she would look at me as if to say, Are you fucking kidding me? I should have trusted Taylar’s intuition—it was much more finely tuned than her mom’s at that point.
IF YOU WANT MY BODY
Jay and I were going through an off period, during which he had started hanging out with Rod Stewart’s daughter Kimberly. Like all of Jay’s girlfriends, she was threatened by me, because even when Jay and I weren’t together together, we were usually still together, and I would usually be trying to win him back. They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and Kimberly had suggested hooking me up with her dad, who was single. I wasn’t especially keen. Years ago, I had met Rod Stewart at the Roxbury and hadn’t been impressed. “Can I get you anything?” he said, leaning on the bar next to me. “Cranberry vodka?” I said. “No, I meant Ferrari, Porsche, Jaguar?” What a cheesetard, I thought.
But I was bored, and jealous of Jay and Kimberly, so I agreed to go on a double date with them. I got ready over at Jay’s house, and Jay did my
makeup; then I showed up with my ex-boyfriend for my blind date with his new girlfriend’s dad. Kids, Hollywood is not a normal place. Seriously. But by this point, I had gotten used to the surreal nature of my life.
Rod was in his midfifties and looked a lot older than I remembered. He had recently separated from his second wife, Rachel Hunter, and was sweet and gentlemanly, but I felt very little attraction and made my excuses as to why I had to leave. “Okay, so why don’t we go out another time?” he said. “Let’s have fun!” When he said “fun” I pictured him running a hot bath naked, looking over his shoulder, smiling, his balls like socks with rocks in them, hanging to his knees. I told that to Jay and he told me to stop grossing him out.
Rod and I met up again with Kimberly and Jay at a club. We were sitting at our table when all of a sudden a whole gang of girls joined us. One was a girl I was not too fond of, because I had heard that she had slept with Jay while we were together. She was sitting right next to Kimberly, and they were joking and whispering. They’re so cunty, I thought. “I am not sitting at this table with certain people,” I announced coldly. “Oh, come on, no drama please,” said Rod.
“Your daughter is being a total bitch.”
Rod tried to ease the tension by being funny. “Feel my thigh,” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“Go on, feel my thigh—I play soccer.”
I prodded his thigh with my forefinger and thumb in three spots. “Yeah, it’s really awesome.”
“Do you want to go to my place and Jacuzzi?”
Ugh, not the Jacuzzi line. You can’t go anywhere in Hollywood without some douchetard trying to get you in his hot tub. I pictured Rod bending over, naked, and puked a little in my mouth.
“Do you think I carry a bikini in my back pocket or something?”
Rod called me a “silly bird” or a “tart” or some English slang word I did not understand. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means ‘dumb whore,’ ” said my nemesis.
Rod, desperate to avert the catfight that was about to erupt, whispered in my ear.
“If you want my body and if you think I’m sexy . . .” I couldn’t believe this guy was for real.
“I don’t know, Rod, perhaps we should get Maggie May and ask her?” I spat. Rod looked at me, appalled. “Actually, I have a better idea.”
I got on the table, bent over, and shoved my ass in his face, spilling his drink in his lap. Then I hopped off the table and marched out of the building. Fuck Rod, fuck Jay, fuck Kimberly, and fuck that other bitch. If there was one thing I had gotten good at over the years, it was not giving a fuck.
A DEVASTATING BLOW
One day in 2005, I got a phone call from my mom I’ll never forget.
“Earl’s really sick, Bobbie. You need to come home.”
Mr. Earl, thanks to a lifetime of smoking, had been diagnosed with emphysema. My mom suggested I move back home to spend time with him, and to reconsider my future.
“Bobbie, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think that you need a backup plan in your life,” said my mom. “Enough of this Hollywood nonsense. I mean, look where it’s gotten you.” She said I should come home to Baton Rouge permanently, go back to school, and train for another, more stable career, because it didn’t look like this whole Tinseltown thing was going anywhere for me now. I surveyed the last fifteen years of my life—a catalog of missed opportunities and bad life decisions. I was even starting to have regrets about divorcing Jani. Maybe we could have made it work. I knew I had to move back home and try to remember what was really important, and spend time with Mr. Earl. Taylar and I packed up my car and drove to Louisiana. At age thirty-six, I moved back in with my parents.
Dragging my suitcases up my mom’s porch steps, I felt like the world’s biggest loser. Stripped of the parties and the velvet ropes, who was I?
“I hear they’re hiring at Subway,” my mom suggested, and I wanted to cry. I gave my old bedroom to Taylar and slept in a sleeping bag on the porch every night. I remembered those evenings as a teenager, watching the love bugs fry. I never imagined life would bring me right back here, to where it all started. Except this time I was broke, divorced, and lonely.
Following my mom’s advice, I enrolled in Aveda esthiology school an hour away and started studying skin care. “Bobbie Brown? You’re famous!” my classmates would say, and I would pretend like I didn’t know what they were talking about. “She’s my cherry pie!” Ugh. I was embarrassed by the attention. I didn’t want to remember I was Bobbie Brown, the Cherry Pie girl who had it all and fucked it up.
Mr. Earl had been awake for days refusing to lie down because he knew, somehow, that if he did, it would be over. Finally, exhausted, he told my mom he was going to take a nap. She lay next to him and they slept awhile. His oxygen machine was still on. After an hour or so she got up. Later she went in to check on him again, but he had stopped breathing. My brother was out back, having band rehearsal with his friends, when he heard my mom’s screams. Mr. Earl had been on so many steroids, he weighed three hundred pounds, but my brother was like Superman—he lifted him off the bed, onto the floor, and spent forty-five minutes giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while we waited for the ambulance. But Mr. Earl never woke up. Adam called me on my cell. “Bobbie, Mr. Earl died, you gotta come home from school.” It was a week before graduation.
My father, Bobby, went with me to the funeral. We held each other as we cried. Mr. Earl had accepted my father back into the family, and when he died, we knew the world had lost a truly kind man. The death of Mr. Earl put things in perspective—you just never know how long anyone is going to be around. I bought my dad a lighter and had it engraved with the words I LOVE YOU, DAD, and gave it to him a couple days after Mr. Earl’s funeral. We were at breakfast, and I noticed my dad wasn’t eating a thing. “I just don’t have an appetite anymore, BJ,” he said. “Well, you need to go get checked out,” I said. “I refuse to bury you too, Dad.”
Bobby seemed to be in a good place in his life. He was running a bar, and I was helping him out on weekends, going to his house and cooking him dinner. For the first time in many years, he and I were bonding. He had a girlfriend with “an ass like a donkey,” which he swore was a good thing. We went to the animal shelter together and I helped my dad choose a puppy to adopt—a little Chihuahua that we named Peanut. I’d never before felt this close to my father, who was in high spirits these days, even though he wasn’t eating a lot and had lost some weight. He acted like the weight loss was because he was so busy, and gave me money to buy him a whole new wardrobe because he couldn’t fit into his old clothes anymore. Upon my insistence, he went to the doctor and afterward called to tell me what the physician had said. When I heard the words “esophageal cancer” I just flipped. No, not you too, Daddy—you can’t be sick too. My dad backtracked. “Well, they didn’t say that I had the cancer; they’re just running some tests.” That weekend he got so sick he had to go to the hospital.
“Are you okay, Daddy?” I asked him, by his bedside.
“Oh, yes, they’re sending me home tomorrow because I’m fine,” he replied.
They did send him home in the morning—but not because he was better. Because there was nothing they could do. The cancer was too advanced. I went to his house and he didn’t look good. He was only eating ice chips. I knew something was very wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me the truth. He had told everyone in the family that he didn’t want me or my brother to know that he was dying, even though he was puking up his insides all day and night, and was unable to eat any food or drink any water. My dad ended up losing nearly forty pounds in a week.
One night, at around 4 A.M., I woke up. Crying and shaking, I knocked on my mom’s door. “Mom, I can’t sleep. I just don’t understand what’s wrong with Dad.” She sighed. “Okay, Bobbie, you have to be strong, okay?” And she told me that my father was dying.
The next day, my dad confirmed it. He told my brother and me that he
loved us, but it looked like he was going to have to say good-bye soon. “It’s okay, Bobbie, don’t cry. These ice chips don’t taste so bad, you know. Kinda like steak, if you use your imagination.” He was in constant pain, and I wanted him to go back to the hospital. But he refused, stubborn old coot. He hated doctors. I had to think of a way to get him back to the hospital, so I told him that if his liver failed, he would almost certainly become mentally retarded. That convinced him to go—he was proud like that, and wanted to have all his marbles right up to the end.
I went back and forth from the hospital every day. Every time I saw him, I would break down in tears and he would yell at me and send me out of the room. My brother was at his bedside around the clock. Then one night at about 4 A.M., my brother called—our dad had passed away singing an old hymn, “I Have Found a Friend in Jesus.” Adam was holding his hand. My dad had never been religious until the last few years of his life. “We’re in the end-time, BJ,” he’d say, and hand me pamphlets. “Okay, Dad, whatever,” I’d say.
I was a screaming basket case at my father’s memorial. When they projected photos of him on a screen, I howled like a beaten dog. It was impossible for me to mourn my father in a quiet or dignified way. There was so much, too much, left unsaid. Mr. Earl had been dead exactly two weeks—two funerals in a fortnight. “Everyone is dying, Mom, we shouldn’t be here anymore,” Taylar said to me at the funeral, and I agreed. The next day, we flew back to L.A.
GOING GOING BACK BACK
Hollywood is such an intoxicating place to live. Even small fishes in its big pond can feel bigger and more important than they ever were back home. Problem is, once you leave, there are plenty more minnows waiting to take your place, and by the time you return, it’s as though you never even existed. I had been gone a whole year and found myself back at ground zero, sober, and a stranger in the town I had called home for so many years.
My mom and I paid for Taylar to live with a school friend of hers while I figured out where I was going to go. I had a girlfriend who invited me to stay with her, but she kicked me out the first night, saying she needed her space. Bret Mazur kindly let me stay at his house for a few days. Then I went to a hotel, but I was already running out of money. I called Jesse Woodrow, a preacher I knew, feeling desperate. “I don’t know what to do,” I said, crying. He said he had a friend who had a spare bedroom and that I could stay there for three days, until her mother arrived for a visit. I showed up with my suitcase and broke down. If I didn’t figure out a place to go, I would be homeless. For real this time.
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