Dirty Rocker Boys: Love and Lust on the Sunset Strip - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bobbie Brown is an American actress and model best known for starring in Warrant’s classic “Cherry Pie” video. In 2011, MSN.com featured Bobbie in the list of the top ten “women who’ve broken the most hearts in rock music.” Bobbie lives in Hollywood and is a star of the reality show Ex-Wives of Rock.

Caroline Ryder is a Los Angeles–based journalist and regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Variety, and LA Weekly. In 2010 she coauthored Kicking Up Dirt, the memoir of X Games motocross champion Ashley Fiolek.

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Dirty Rocker Boys

Chapter One

COCK OF AGES

EX-WIFE OF ROCK

Wait, what happened? Last week, Tommy Lee was my fiancé. This week, he’s married. To Pamela Anderson.

It was February 1995, and in the aftermath of Tommy’s shotgun wedding on the beach in Cancún, four days after our breakup, my coping strategy was twofold.

1. Get high.

I had a line on some of the dopest trucker speed in Malibu. It was a killer buzz, lasting for days—back in 1995, the meth was clean as a bean. I had been secretly using throughout my relationship with Tommy, as a way to maintain the rail-thin Barbie-doll figure that Tommy liked, and as a way to escape the growing sense that my life was fucked-up, on all levels. Very few people knew about my little problem, even though my pupils were dilated in broad daylight and I shouted at invisible dogs. I drove to the corner store for soda, came back eight hours later with gardening tools. My glitter gun became my best friend as I embarked on endlessly elaborate middle-of-the-night crafting projects, just to give my racing mind something to focus on. I was spun, a member of a long-established club known as the “Hollywood Speed Freak Society”—a long line of celebrity tweakers who, like me, were afflicted by a cursed disposition for that unsavory mistress, methamphetamine.

2. Get even.

A few years prior, a voodoo doctor in my native Louisiana had warned me about messing with revenge. Dark energy, he said, “will come back and bite you.” But after seven years of having my heart shredded by Sunset Strip cock rockers, I wanted to teach those assholes a lesson. I’m going to flip the script, treat the guys the way they treat us, I thought. I had reached my tipping point. I was ripe for revenge.

I looked in the mirror. Twenty-six years old. My peroxide mane was messy; my roots were showing. I was Courtney Love meets Malibu Barbie, with the gaunt yet chic figure of a runway model—around ninety-five pounds on a fat day. Thank you, crystal. The world knew me as Bobbie Brown, fiancée of Tommy Lee, ex-wife of Jani Lane, cutie-patootie from the “Cherry Pie” video on MTV. They’d yet to experience Bobbie Brown, wrathful, world-weary drug addict with no pride left to lose. I put on lipstick, a Wonderbra, and some assless chaps. I was ready to hit the clubs.

After a year playing Malibu Rapunzel, holed up in Tommy Lee’s beachfront fortress, I couldn’t wait to fall back into Hollywood’s welcoming arms. I had always been a club kid. I loved the darkness, the anonymity, the feeling of being underground. The velvet ropes that melted as soon as I arrived. Tommy may have tossed me aside, but in clubland, I was still queen.

In 1995, Thursday nights at Grand Ville were where it was at. The club was a hub of the ’90s neo-burlesque scene, full of corseted girls with shoe-polish-black hair, a whirl of rhinestones, glitter, and feathers. Grand Ville was the toughest door in town, but the promoter, Rick Calamaro, a dear friend of mine (may he rest in peace), always greeted me with a smile.

“Welcome back, Bobbie.”

I stepped inside, through the looking glass, and into a different reality. A pleasure dome, decadent and carnivalesque. Everywhere I turned, I saw the ghosts of my past loves. There were the Tommy Lees—wild, tattooed romantics, who turn mean when the roses wilt. The Jani Lanes—sweet, tortured artists weighed down by their demons. The Matthew Nelsons—blond angels destined to fly away. The exes in my life are no different to the exes in any girl’s life—except mine all happened to be rock stars.

Who better to confide in about my problems than a wide-eyed actor named Leonardo DiCaprio, who had about as much life experience as a Care Bear? “Thing is,” I told him as we chatted at the club, “if you’re not grown-up enough to deal with their ‘musician issues,’ then rock star lovers can send a girl down some very dark and dangerous rabbit holes. You know what I mean?”

Leo did not know what I meant. We were in the VIP lounge at Grand Ville, and he was looking at me like I was insane. I was insane, kind of. The stress of being married to one rock star (Jani Lane), engaged to another (Tommy Lee), and then jilted thanks to my professional rival (Pamela Anderson) had taken a toll. I was tired, jaded, defeated. The speed was playing tricks on my sanity, and my behavior had grown notoriously unpredictable. But how could Leo possibly understand? He was so fresh and upbeat. He looked like he should be drinking milk, not martinis.

For years Leo had been dancing up to me at the clubs, saying how he wanted to make me his girlfriend. I smiled and patted him on the head. How cute. I was seven years his senior and felt like his grandma. I’d never been someone’s G.I.L.F. before. “Do you think it’s too Harold and Maude if I do it with Leo?” I asked Sharise Neil, ex-wife of Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil, and my sister in pleasure seeking. Sharise raised an eyebrow and shrugged. At least baby-faced Leo had a grown-up career, I thought. The Basketball Diaries, his breakthrough movie, had come out that year, and he was about to star in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. If I hooked up with Leo, who was younger, cuter, and about to be more famous than Tommy Lee, it would hit Tommy right in the ballsack.

This time, when Leo came dancing up to me, I played along. “Call me, I dare you.” My inner G.I.L.F. was ready to party.

UNICORNS AND UNIBROWS

I opened my front door, and there he was, wide face, cornflower-blue eyes, big smile. Leo’s hair was pulled back in barrettes and he was wearing a headband. He looked pretty, like a ballerina. I invited him in. “Can I put on some music?” he asked, waving a CD in the air.

“Sure.”

Don’t go chasing waterfalls.

Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.

Leo sat on the floor, eyes closed, singing along. I recognized the song, by that R & B girl band TLC. It was all over the radio. I stood there for a while, watching Leo sing along, wondering what to do next, and what conversation there was to make. There was none. Pokémon? New Kids on the Block? College? “Let’s go to the bedroom.” I said. Leo nodded.

My bed was big and tall, and you had to climb up a small ladder to get to it. “You want to get up there with me, Leo?”

“Okay!”

We started kissing. I pulled his T-shirt over his head, leaving the barrettes in his hair. I unbuttoned his jeans and tugged down on his boxers. What I saw made me gasp. It made no sense. The kid put Tommy Lee to shame. “Wow, Leo, I wasn’t expecting that.” Next to his slim body, his assets were startlingly huge. “Wait, let me turn the light on,” I said. “I’ve got to see this properly.” Yup, even under closer inspection, Leonardo DiCaprio’s crotch was on steroids. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Ha, wait till Tommy “I’ve got the biggest dick in Hollywood” hears about this, I thought.

“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....