‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (34 page)

When I reminded him we had a heavy credit card debt and we needed to put at least half the check toward it, he shot me a dismissive ‘of course,’ and then launched into me about my ‘racy’role in
Dorm Daze II
 — it was a movie where he’d sat on the set and watched me film. Still, now, over almost a year of marriage later, it was suddenly too racy for his conservative taste, and since I’d gotten rid of anything ‘porn-related’ he could complain about, this was the next desperate level he’d sunken too. It was disappointing in ways I can’t even fully describe in words, because he was now demeaning the transition I’d worked so hard to make from adult film/wrestling into mainstream T.V. and film gigs.To realize that my own husband would stoop as low as to try and tear down that progress was the equivalent of his spitting in my face, and I finally felt he’d crossed a line that I couldn’t forgive. Looking back in hindsight, it was obvious to me that he wasn’t ready to be married, I had his back that way, but he clearly didn’t have mine. Whenever people in the business would talk shit about him behind his back or online, I was the FIRST to come to his defense, but all he could do in return was talk the same kind of shit to me about my past. At that point in our
marriage
, he had nothing going on with his career and was drinking to cope with it, and instead of admitting THAT was the root of his drinking, he chose to blame it on me and things I’d done almost a decade before.

A lot of our turmoil at that point stemmed from Matt out of desperation to have some hangers-on like he had back in the Himsa days — having hooked up with all these little 19 and 20-year-old equivalents of the cast of the movie
Mallrats
. He spent his days at the bar illegally plying them with drinks, then listening to them build him up about how
Dorm Daze
was my most offensive on-screen appearance ever. Since he’d never watched the movie to begin with and wouldn’t because of all the shit his little under-aged rat-pack was telling him would upset him, he never really could be informed. Sitting here now, I can’t believe I’m even bothering to give him this much explanatory air-time in MY life story, but he was my husband, and I want my fans to understand why I went to such lengths to try and save my marriage. I felt like there was no way a bunch of kids, who operated on my ex-husband’s maturity level, could break up our home.The whole thing seemed silly to me to begin with, but because they fed into his desperate ego, Matt took them seriously, which meant that I had to as well. Accepting the fact that my husband had the emotional maturity of a teenager was difficult to accept, but as time went on, it explained a lot of his naiveté, and made me seriously begin to question whether we could really have a future together.

We were definitely not at a good point in our marriage, and I’d finally begun to quietly accept the possibility that things might not change. I had been the fiercest believer in the opposite notion with Matt for too long, and it had taken so much out of me that letting go of hope was at times the only freedom I felt being with him. Most of the time I felt trapped, but still in spite of a CHORUS of noise from friends of mine that I needed to cut my losses and leave him now before things got any worse for me, for some reason, I couldn’t let him go. I spent Thanksgiving that year in L.A. laid up sick in bed, and things weren’t looking any brighter heading into the end of the year. Matt’s picking and picking at me about the National Lampoon movie got so bad at one point in early December that he actually walked out on me! After a week, he came back on his knees, crying and telling me he loved me, but it didn’t give me hope things would really improve. I’d started to lose faith in him as a real man by that point, but tried to give things another shot given it was the holidays, and the little girl in me still believed sometimes miracles could happen at Christmas. That’s what I told myself anyway, I just loved him too much to let go of him that easily, even as difficult as things already were.

When Christmas rolled around that year, Mr. Romantic decided to thank me for all these nice presents I’d bought for him by taking me to dinner at the fucking Rainbow Bar and Grill. I love the Rainbow, but it’s not exactly Ruth’s Chris Steak House, which we probably couldn’t have afforded at that point anyway. We were going broke, FAST, and every time I tried to bring up our financial situation, Matt would hit me with a new rant about my past and how he didn’t want to live off that money. Still, he wouldn’t lift a finger to try and bring in any new revenues, all he kept doing was talking on and on about his forthcoming Himsa settlement check. What he didn’t want to hear was the reality that we were so deep in debt at that point that his measly $7000 or $8000 wouldn’t begin to cover what we owed. Let alone, what we would owe as time went on and interest rates continued to mount on the credit cards we’d been living off. We spent New Year’s Eve at the Terrace Bar and Grill in Marina Del Rey, and I did my best to let my mountain of worries go for the moment, but in truth, I couldn’t shake my worries for our future. I just wanted to die. I tried hanging myself finally when Matt had been drinking, but stupidly, I didn’t tie the noose tight enough, and my feet were too close to the ground. Besides, who would have taken care of the cats?

2007 began with the receipt of Matt’s Himsa check, which was a nice, albeit brief reprieve from our impending financial storm front. Matt was still off living in a fantasyland land that I was bankrolling. In reality, and at this point, my savings had been sucked almost entirely dry — down into Matt’s liver via his nasty alcohol addition, which he spent virtually every day up until this point perfecting, rather than focusing on music or making our marriage work. On top of that, there hadn’t been any movement with his new band demo, which was truly worrisome. I’d driven him all over L.A. that prior fall to labels to shop it, using all my connections at Metal Blade Records, Century Media Records, and telling all the bands I interviewed for
Metal’s Dark Side
and my TV show about his new group. I had been his biggest promoter up to that point, but the bottom line was his music had to stand on its own, and no one had offered a deal thus far. When he did finally receive his settlement check from his ex-band Himsa, it was bittersweet because the money was already spent.

Of the $8000 he received in his settlement, we paid about $3500 off on a credit card I’d been paying for him; then he took another $3000 and bought a new fucking guitar, as if he didn’t have enough of those lying around. After the credit card tab and the guitar, and settling with Bob Kulick on the balance we owed for the demo I’d financed 90% of the past summer, we were left with a little under $1000 to look ahead with. Thankfully, the NAAM convention came in later January, which was my first real opportunity that year to make any new money, so I was excited to go and just praying that Matt didn’t fuck anything up for me during my signings with his drinking and jealousy. I was signing for Coffin Case, and also covering the convention live for the
L.A. Metal Scene TV Show
, which was a big deal for me, because I got to email Lamb of God, Opeth,

Arch Enemy, Hatebreed among a bad-ass list of others! Sadly, by the end of the first night, even though we’d had a good time hanging out with our friends from Cradle of Filth, Shadows Fall, and Dragonforce, Matt had predictably been drinking and drinking so much that night that even his friends were getting worried.

By 3 in the morning, we were arguing about the fact I had to get up and work the next day. By the time he was done calling me every name in the book in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, I realized his alcoholism was past the point of no return. I had held out hope for so long that he would change, or sober up long enough to realize how much we really had to lose at that point, but he’d let me down every time. My husband had become a joke, a horrible joke, and his drinking problem was far worse than Earl’s had been. Earl was an annoying drunk, at worse, Matt was a
DANGEROUS
drunk. He even had the audacity when we woke up arguing the next morning, to suggest we should divorce because I was ruining his career, vs. the alcohol. It was unbelievable, and day two of the convention wasn’t much of an improvement: Matt spent the whole day drinking while I was working the convention floor doing band interviews for my T.V. show. He ended that night the same way, which was highly inconsiderate to the next day I had before me, which included another signing, interviews for the T.V. show, and a fashion show, all of which I had to fit into one day.

After the fashion show, we headed home and I found out Matt had blown $500 of the $1000 he had left out of his settlement check on a bar tab! I was livid, but tried to keep things on an even keel while I figured out whether to stay in the marriage or not. I felt at that point as though I’d spent my entire adult life taking care of the men in my life, and felt it was time the one I’d chosen to be my husband stepped up for me for a change. Still, when I broached the subject of his getting a job of ANY sort, his solution — as usual — was to berate me about my adult film past and suggest I was somehow holding him back as a musician. It was laughable, and honestly, by that point, Matt could have been one of those clowns on that A&E show
Intervention.
He was that sad of an addict and his concept of reality rested entirely in whatever bottle of Jack Daniels he was pounding that day.

at any point in our relationship. Matt had become so controlling by that point that he wouldn’t allow me to even do booth signings at conventions! That was my bread and butter, and the fact that Matt was jealous of any fan of mine because he attributed ALL their adulation to my adult film past was ludicrous! It was also bringing us to the literal edge of financial ruin. To put that reality in perspective for my readers — even though Matt still didn’t seem to get it — by that April, for the first time in my adult life, I had problems paying the rent. Not surprisingly, my deadbeat husband — as usual — was doing
NOTHING
to contribute to our living expenses, and had put such a choke-hold on my ability to cover those costs that I was beginning to feel suffocated, and even panicked in a way I never had before in my life. I even felt so desperate about Matt’s drinking problem that I resorted to calling his mother to speak to her about it, but she basically blew me off.

When our eviction notice arrived later that month, I was heart-broken. I’d lived in that apartment for a decade, it was my home, where all my memories had been built, and were now being torn to shreds — along with what was left of my dignity, heart and marriage. I was at a true low point, and the fact that Matt wouldn’t even swallow his pride to call his parents and borrow a month’s rent just made my heart sink even lower. Everything was on me at that point, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to pull through this time. We got a Notice to Appear re our eviction about 10 days later, and I’d hoped at the very least that would be a wake-up call of sorts for Matt to see how desperate things had gotten, but it seemed lost on him. I wound up selling furniture trying to come up with the outstanding rent, precious keepsakes like the first dresserset I’d ever bought after moving to L.A., our living room couch that I’d had for years, gone. I was watching the pieces of my personal life being removed one by one, and didn’t know how much more I could take, or have taken from me.

By June, we were formally being evicted, and our plan was to move to Seattle to live in Matt’s parents’ basement while we re-grouped, with my cats being left out back in the cold in some chicken coup. It was rockbottom, and it was the first time in my life — even with everything I’d already been through — that I felt I’d really hit that point. No matter what emotional issues I might have been working through in the course of my adult film career, that pain was at least compensated for by the stardom and financial stability I’d worked so hard to accrue. From there, working

my way out of that business, out of those fucking strip clubs and into wrestling performance/promotion- it had all been a climb upward. Then graduating into the world of Metal as a model and Veejay personality, for every sacrifice I’d made along that way, there had been a reward, which to me had offered at least some sense of it being worth it. Now, having watched all of that slowly slip away over the past year into the avalanche that was now bearing down on us, I felt completely helpless for the first time in my life.

On top of everything else, I could tell his parents HATED the idea of my moving in with them, and was desperate to avoid us having to take that route. I knew it would be the ultimate death of our relationship, and after losing everything else in my personal life, it was the only thing I had left to fight for. Thankfully, my then-best friend Sickie came to the rescue and offered that we could move temporarily to New York to live with him until we got back on our feet. It was the first lifeline anyone had thrown us that I really welcomed, and was truly relieved we didn’t have to lower ourselves to living in my husband’s parents’ basement. Still, it was perhaps the only silver lining to an otherwise very dark set of clouds hanging over us. When we finally were evicted, we had to leave my bedroom set because we didn’t have room in storage. We had to leave my six cats in L.A. with friends of Matt’s, and sell my beautiful yellow Mustang that had been my dream car for many years and that I’d worked my ass off to buy. A dear friend of mine paid for our plane tickets to fly to New York, and when we landed, I was just relieved to be away from the shame of everything that had just gone down back in L.A.

Thankfully, later that June, I signed at a comic convention in New York and made a few thousand dollars, which helped get us back in our feet in the very short term, but we were still living very much day to day. Matt had also landed a gig with Warrel Dane’s solo band, and was writing a lot of material for that while I helped Sickie run his eBay business, so I just focused on making sure I didn’t lose my career like we had everything else. As happy as I was for Matt finding a potentially viable music project, it hurt me deeply that his parents were willing to shell out $1500 to help him buy a 4th guitar when they wouldn’t lend us that same money to keep from being evicted back in L.A. I felt our marriage at that point was definitely in a probationary period of sorts, and so I tried to be supportive and not make an issue of it, but quietly, it stung me deeply. I knew that even if things got better between Matt and me by some miracle that his parents would never accept me into their family, and I found an entire new struggle trying to make peace with that.

In later July, we decided to move back to L.A. to rebuild our life, and were crashing on my friends’ Bobby and Shelia’s couch while I waited on some royalty money from Australia to get moved into a new apartment. While things had been temporarily peaceful in New York, as soon as we landed back in L.A., Matt was back at it with me again, picking fights over nothing and drinking himself under the table on a daily basis — when we could least afford it. We finally found a cute studio apartment in West Hollywood that I felt I could live with, and even though we had a roof over our heads again, we had no car and no money coming in on Matt’s end, so again I became our sole provider. At this point, I had stopped giving a shit about the fact that my husband was a deadbeat; I was in survival mode, trying to make sure the rent stayed paid and that I could afford payments on the little car I’d managed to get my hands on. More importantly, I had to quickly re-establish my presence back in L.A., and began working again on my
L.A. Metal Scene T.V. Show
in August, focused on the future and picking up the pieces of my career, and maybe in time, the rest of my shattered life. Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.

As the fall blew along, things were beginning to look up because Matt was going to be heading to Nashville in later October to begin work with Warrel Dane of Nevermore on his solo project from the record label for his songwriting on the album. I was happy for the most part because I felt maybe Matt had finally found something that might actually encourage him to do something with himself professionally. For almost the entire duration of our relationship up to that point, he hadn’t done anything once his stint in Himsa had ended. Many of his friends had let me know that there had been musical opportunities that had come his way in the interim, but he’d been happy to mooch off of me, and really hadn’t ever carried his weight financially in the marriage. So this was great news it was a chance for him to do something to contribute, because I’d been so busy paying for everything, putting a roof over our heads that we were running out of money. I’d loss the income from my website since he made me take it down and though I had some money coming from a 3PW licensing deal for Australia, I was really looking forward to my trip there to further shore things up. I had a really big signing lined up with wrestlers Rob Van Dam and Sabu for the Armageddon Festival in

Australia, and I’d decided to bring Matt with me so we could get away together. Naturally, I paid for his ticket because he had no money of his own, and we stayed in a really nice hotel, were taken out to dinner that night by my friends, so everything was comped for him, thanks to me. Nonetheless, he still saw fit to act like a dick throughout the entire trip, and was drinking heavier than ever. By the time it was over, I’d thankfully made about $4500, most of which I put into an IRA I wanted to replace and keep safe from Matt’s alcoholic clutches.

One night I got us into Motorhead’s show through my relationship with Lemmy, who let us all backstage, and it gave Lemmy and me a chance to catch-up. Lemmy is someone I’ve always thought really highly of, and he has to be one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in L.A. People see him as a God, but to me, he’s always been Lemmy — this really kind-hearted person. He’s better than Dr. Phil when it comes to advice! Matt was busy wandering off backstage, throwing back Jack Daniels and Coke one after another, and after a while, was acting like a total dope in front of my friends. I’d dealt with this once before with Earl Slate, who was also an alcoholic and drug addict, and it had just kept getting worse and worse with my husband. I’d even called his mom earlier in that year to alert her to the fact that I thought he had a drinking problem, and of course, she blew me off, which I thought was sad given it was his own mother. I’ve always been a very loyal and loving person, the type of person who puts my significant other first when I love them, and makes them my priority, which meant I was putting Matt’s problems before my own happiness. Though that should have been his # 1 priority, I wanted him to get well. Even though he acted like a drunken ass all week, I tolerated it in the hopes things would change. Still, in another part of my heart, I knew the end of Matt and I was getting near. It wasn’t a matter of if, it was matter of when.

When we got back to L.A., we were in the midst of a drama with my landlord over this old toxic heater they wouldn’t fix. Thankfully, we were leaving town right after we got back to go to Nashville for Matt to record his guitar parts for Nevermore singer Warrel Dane’s solo album. Matt and Warrel were working with this songwriter Peter Wichers and I was excited for Matt to finally be recording new music. He and I stayed at this horrible Days Inn because Warrel — also a raging alcoholic — was staying at the band’s apartment, and I didn’t want him and Matt together drinking it up all night when Matt was there to work. In an odd way, I felt inside as though this was our last chance to get on our feet again as a couple, namely by Matt starting to take some kind of aim professionally toward being a real man and pulling his weight financially. While he was recording, I’d bring Matt down food to the studio because he had low blood sugar, and our money was starting to run low. One night Warrel offered to take me out to Applebee’s for lunch while Matt was working, and we ended up getting thrown out because Warrel was being drunk and louder than the staff apparently would tolerate. It shows you how these two were evil twins, and in an example of how much worse things got once they were together, on one of our last nights in town, Warrel took us out to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for dinner. Naturally, he and Matt got wrecked throughout the meal to the point where Warrel excused himself at one point in mid-conversation, turned away from us and vomited underneath the table before returning to the meal/convo as if nothing had happened. We stayed with Warrel for the last few days in the band’s apartment, and after tripping over empty Vodka bottle after empty Vodka bottle, I decided it was just a really unhealthy environment for me to be around. Thankfully, I was able to move us to the album producer, Peter Wichers’ house, which was a cleaner environment for everyone involved.