My Life Outside the Ring (27 page)

Linda and I had a triple-king-sized bed in our bedroom, and the kids wound up sleeping in that giant bed with me that night. It didn’t matter what I said. They were worried sick. Their mom was missing. For all we knew, she had crashed her car somewhere and was lying in a ditch on the side of the road.

Thanksgiving morning came, and no Linda. I walked all over the house, opening and closing doors, hoping that she had come home late and just slept in another room. She wasn’t there. I kept thinking that she’d show up by dinnertime, so the kids and I started cooking. I’ve never cooked a turkey in my life, but I put it in the oven and did my best. A few hours later, the three of us sat down and ate Thanksgiving dinner in that house alone. The kids without their mom. Me without my wife.

In my mind, on that Thanksgiving Day, I didn’t have anything left to be thankful for at all.

Two days later, Linda called. She was in California, happy as could be, acting as if nothing was wrong. I tried to get an explanation, and she just said she needed to go to California. “Why?” she asked—as if my asking for an explanation was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. As if her behavior was normal.

I loved her so much and I wanted to help her. I wanted to get to the bottom of why she was acting this way. But I couldn’t. I felt helpless. I felt lost.

Chapter 14

Season of Change

By the time season four
of
Hogan Knows Best
came around, Brooke’s music career was really heating up. It should have been a really happy time, but Brooke had so many problems with her mom that she kept breaking down and crying at the recording studio and before her performances out on the road.

The fact is, Linda’s rage and fury kept crossing into her managerial role. When Brooke was hired to sing the national anthem at the Daytona 500, in front of 125,000 people, Linda made Brooke so upset she barely got through the performance. When she opened for this real hot group, My Chemical Romance, same thing. She would get on her about her clothes and her outfits and how fat she looked, her hairstyle. She’d yell at her for missing notes, not sounding good. It was affecting Brooke’s ability to get the job done, in a real big way.

So the record company tried to keep friends and handlers around Brooke all the time—just to take care of her and make sure she was all right.

One of those handlers the record company brought in was a woman named Christiane Plante. Christiane was so great with Brooke. She did everything she could to look after her, and I loved seeing someone take care of my daughter that way. She was just so positive and caring. She was thirty-four, but she and Brooke became really close. Almost like best friends, in a way.

Linda was disappearing on a regular basis by January and February of 2007. If she wasn’t flying out to California, she was driving all the way back to Tampa. I never knew why, and half the time I didn’t know where she was. The F-yous were just out of control, and now always coupled with her threatening to move to California and file for divorce. It’s like she was taunting me, trying to get me to pull the trigger and leave her first. There was no back and forth anymore. No give and take. I don’t think you can even call it a marriage. It wasn’t a partnership, either. It wasn’t a friendship. It was nothing but awful.

On the first day of filming for season four, Linda just didn’t show up. The production crew was all set up, and the whole staff was there and ready to go, and no Linda. We missed the whole first day. We missed the whole second day. Suddenly the producers and the VH1 guys are threatening to sue me. “Don’t sue me! I’m here! It’s Linda,” I kept telling them.

At first I didn’t know where she was. I was just worried sick. I got real depressed about it. I was worried something had happened to her. When she finally called from California she didn’t even have an excuse. She just kept telling me to have them start without her. I told her she needed to get on a plane, and she refused. It was awful. It took almost two weeks before we got Linda back and actually started shooting. I was just a wreck. The fact that our personal problems were spilling over into Brooke’s career, and now this show? I was embarrassed, and I didn’t know what to do.

None of this is an excuse for what happened next. I just want you to understand the state of my relationship, and how fragile my emotions were.

One day in the middle of all of that, Christiane Plante called. Brooke had broken down again, and she wanted to ask me what I thought she should do to help her, but as soon as she heard the sound of my voice she said, “Oh my God. What’s wrong?”

She turned that caring attention she had given Brooke on me. So I told her. “I’m just real worried about Linda,” I replied.

Christiane knew what Linda had been pulling. She heard about it all from Brooke, and witnessed plenty of Linda’s behavior firsthand. She knew how much trouble Brooke had been having, and she sympathized with my situation. “I don’t know why she’s doing this to you and Brooke.”

Over the phone that day, Christiane gave me a shoulder to lean on, at least verbally. I can’t tell you how much I needed that.

Maybe a month or so later, Brooke made an appearance up in New York City, and I went along to introduce her from the stage. Christiane was along for that trip, and the three of us—she, Brooke, and I—went out to dinner afterward. Back at the hotel that night, Christiane and I both stopped by Brooke’s room to check on her at the same time. I eventually left the two of them there and went downstairs to my room. A half hour or so later, because I’m always over the top and have to check one more time, I called Brooke’s room again just to make sure she was okay.

Christiane answered the phone. She said Brooke was going to bed and she was just leaving. Then she asked me what I was doing.

“I’m probably gonna drink a glass of wine and just hang out,” I said. Then words came from my mouth that I didn’t expect. “Why don’t you come down and join me?”

It felt like two seconds later we were in a room together. We were both drinking a glass of wine, just talking, but I felt like she wanted to do more than that, you know? I was real attracted to her, for so many reasons—and my wife and I hadn’t been intimate in so long that I can’t even tell you how long it had been.

All of a sudden, Christiane reached her arm over to put her hand on my back—and I ducked. It was a weird instinct. I ducked the way a dog that’s been hit too many times would cower when someone raises a hand.

“Are you okay?” Christiane asked. Apparently it surprised her, too.

“Yeah, yeah. You just caught me off guard there,” I said.

Next thing I know, the two of us started kissing. Not to sound perverted or anything, but it was fantastic. Here I am in my fifties now, and this was a really attractive thirty-four-year-old woman, with dark hair and a curvaceous body. And just to have some affection and genuine caring mixed in with that kind of physical attraction? It felt good. It was such an emotional and physical release.

We didn’t have sex that night, but it opened the door. Over the course of the next two months we did have sex, maybe five different times. That was it.

Linda had no idea. For a while it had that sort of naughty appeal, like a kid sneaking some chocolate that he’s not supposed to have. Just seeing Christiane during the course of a normal business day with Brooke became this real exciting thing. It was an entirely new experience for me. Like I said, I had never done anything like this in twenty-two years of marriage.

In a way, that Christiane excitement kept me going for a couple of months. It helped me just to get through the days.

It was no
coincidence that the very first episode of the final season of our reality show was called “Wedlock Headlock.” I think the crew filming our visit to a marriage counselor was as much for their benefit as it was ours.

Yes, Linda and I kissed and made up on TV, but things went right back to the way they’d been whenever the cameras stopped rolling. Heck, even when the cameras
were
rolling. We couldn’t hide it anymore. But the really bad stuff hit the editing room floor.

They call it “reality,” but I guess the real inner workings of the Hogan family’s married life didn’t make for good TV.

To get away from all of the headaches, the scripts seemed to go further out on a limb to put us in funny situations. They sent us to a dude ranch in Wyoming for vacation. We went up to Universal Studios in Orlando, where we figured the only way we could ever have a normal day of family fun without being mobbed by fans was to wear all this prosthetic makeup and go into that park in disguise.

The weird thing was, it actually worked for a while. They put a big nose and a big belly on me and made me look like a real old man. They put a big butt on Linda and warts on her face and made her look like some redneck chick. Brooke wore a black wig, and Nick looked like a mudwhomper. As we walked through the park, and genuinely started having fun, it made me realize that things had to be fake in order for this family to have fun and be happy anymore.

I looked around and saw, once and for all, that for our family to be happy we either had to pretend to be something we’re not, or keep moving so fast that we wouldn’t have time to fall prey to our normal routines.

Which basically meant that my family wasn’t functioning at all.

Going Home

That spring of 2007, in the last days of filming our final season, the whole family made a trip back to the big house in Clearwater. Almost as soon as we arrived, the production company insisted that we take a ride over to visit the house that I grew up in. I guess they had already cleared it with the guy who owns the place now, ’cause he was waiting on us when we pulled into the driveway.

It was so strange to drive into Port Tampa and see those old brick roads; to drive past the houses of old friends, and enemies, and girls I wished I’d had the nerve to kiss. It was the first time I had been back since right after my dad died in 2001, and my perspective on the whole place was just so different now.

Some of the houses looked exactly the same, even after all those years. Not mine. That little square house I grew up in had a big extension off the back, which at least doubled its size, but you could see the shape of what the house used to be when you looked at it straight on from the front. Honestly, it seemed smaller than ever to me that day.

When I walked into the kitchen, it looked like some kind of fancy bistro. The new owner had installed a stainless steel stove with one of those fancy air vents, and had a plate on the counter filled with corks from all the red wine he liked to drink. There were beautiful hardwood floors. Nothing about the place was the same. It was shocking that a place that small could turn out so beautifully.

The owner, this real nice guy who was probably about forty, said he had something for me. All of a sudden he pulled out this little die-cast truck—a toy tanker. I recognized that truck. It was mine.

It was a real weird feeling, and it hit me so off center.

I had driven over that day with Linda and my mom and the kids in the car. My mom didn’t want to go in the house. She’s mostly blind now and couldn’t really see it anyway, but she didn’t want to come in for some reason. I think it made her sad. And all I was thinking about as I walked into that house was how fed up I was with Linda’s complaining.

Then all of a sudden this guy handed me this little truck. He said he was doing some gardening and he found it buried in the dirt. I remembered that dirt. It was black, and hot. I used to play in that dirt all the time—with my big yellow Tonka truck and this little blue tanker. And here it was.

After all the thirty or forty years it’d been buried, the paint had faded almost entirely, and it was all pinkish-white underneath. I thought about being a kid in that house; how I’d play in the back and stuff rocks up my nose. I remembered how awesome it was just to sit in that dirt without a care in the world, and how happy I was back then.

I was happy in that moment, too: to be out of that car and in a situation where Linda was forced to stop her complaining. “Do we have to do this? Oh, Jesus Christ. What the hell are they gonna do with
this
story line?”

Holding that little truck just switched gears on me, emotionally.

Half of my father’s ashes were spread in the backyard there, under the grapefruit and tangelo trees that he loved so much. My dad hated staying indoors almost as much as my mom hated the Florida heat; so she’d stay indoors and run the air conditioner all day while my dad stayed out in that backyard from sunup till sundown. They found a way to make their marriage work in that tiny house, with no money at all. Now part of him was there forever, under those trees that made him so proud, while the rest of him I’d scattered out in the Gulf of Mexico, knowing how much he always loved the water.