The Dirt (64 page)

She said I could, so I melted into her for five minutes. I buried my head in her blond hair and just lost myself like some kind of old, lecherous, sentimental fool inhaling the aroma of an eighteen-year-old for the first time in half a century.

She had polished off most of the wine, so I suggested that she stay the night. Too nervous that she’d think I had the wrong intention, I quickly said I’d sleep in my bedroom and she could have the guest room. I walked her to the spare room and, before I could leave, she pulled me down onto the bed. Sober, I was able to enjoy every second and every caress. As we rolled around together, I was going out of my mind with lust. I probably had all the subtlety of a dog humping a doorknob. It had been such a long time since I was last pressed against a beautiful woman I actually liked and respected. I wanted to fuck her so badly, but I was so turned on I knew it would only last a second. Then she’d hate me because I’d be the lamest fuck of her life.

“I have to go to my room,” I told her.

“No,” she whispered. “Stay.”

I was exhausted because I wasn’t used to staying up so late, but I was so excited to be lying next to this panty-clad bombshell that it took me hours to fall asleep. When I awoke, the sun was rising and she was gone.

I rolled out of bed, put on my robe, and found her smoking a cigarette on a veranda overlooking the future site of my giant pussy pool. Her back was to me, and she was gazing out at the multimillion-dollar mansions of my neighbors. “What are you doing?” I asked as I stepped through the veranda door.

She turned around startled and saw this ugly rock star in a robe coming out of a giant white-marble-filled house lit up by the rising sun. It looked like a scene from
Scarface
.

“This is way too much for me to handle,” she said. “I’m out of here.”

“You can’t leave, you can’t leave,” I begged.

She grabbed the rest of her clothes and ran out to her car, with me in my robe offering her anything if she’d just stay. She peeled out of the driveway and I stood there alone, knowing exactly how the cockeyed Geena Davis must have felt when I left. I was a monster who wine had somehow made attractive to this girl for about two hours. I sat down on the bed and started writing: “She’s so afraid of love / Is so afraid of hate / What’s she running / From now?”

The song was called “Afraid,” and it was about both of us. In less than forty-eight hours, I had gone from being repulsed by this girl to falling in love with her to having my heart broken to being repulsed with myself. I fell into a fitful sleep for a few hours, then left her a message. Breaking every rule of making a woman want you by not seeming too eager, I told her that I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time and I begged her to call me. She did, and apologized for running off scared. She had been so drunk, she said, that she couldn’t even remember whether we had fucked. I told her that we had fucked all night, and that afterward she had said I was the best lay she’d ever had.

After a few more dates, just when everything was starting to work out, Donna screeched into my driveway and came charging at me waving a fax I had written. Evidently Jenny McCarthy’s manager and boyfriend worked with Donna’s manager. And when he heard about the new man in Donna’s life, he produced the form letter that I had written to Jenny McCarthy asking for a date. All of a sudden, I went in Donna’s estimation from being a lonely, lovable rock star to a misogynist star-fucker.

To make matters worse, that afternoon we were playing with my son Gunner when Brandi burst into the house saying that it was her week to have him. Gunner was having a good time and didn’t want to leave, but Brandi insisted. Though Gunner began to scream and cry, she didn’t seem to care at all. In front of Donna and Gunner, she started to yell and humiliate me. I stormed out of the room, loaded the nine-millimeter gun in my room, and swore that this time I’d do it. I was going to shoot that cold-hearted bitch in the head. I could hear Gunner’s screams reverberating through the house. All my logic circuitry shut down and my mind went black with anger.

I came tearing into the hallway, but Donna caught me. “Take it easy, Scarface,” she said.

After a few minutes of arguing, I handed her the gun and barreled past her into my son’s room. But Brandi and Gunner were nowhere to be found. She had already left with him. I collapsed onto Gunner’s bed and burst into tears. I was a total fuck-up: I had probably scared Donna away forever.

A funny thing about girls, though, is that the more you do wrong, the more they like you. Between those stupid faxes and my uncontrollable temper tantrum, she could see that I was a lost little boy who was badly in need of help. So she began helping me. The next day she came over to my house with a gift-wrapped present: a fifteen-disc CD-ROM called “Family Tree Maker.” I typed in my name, then my father’s name. The CD drive whirred and my parents’ names appeared on the screen. Below them was my birth name and that of my brother, Randy Feranna. Wait! My brother Randy? I didn’t have any brothers.

fig. 2

Clockwise from left: Storm, Nikki, Gunner, Decker,
Donna D’Errico, and Rhyan D’Errico

N
obody thought it would work. But it did—for a while. Pamela and I were so fucking happy—everything in our personalities seemed to mesh. She wanted a child more than anything in the world, which was exactly what I’d been wanting since my marriage to Heather. And Pamela was a lot more easygoing and fun to be with. Together, we came up with all kinds of ideas, from furniture companies we wanted to start to clothing lines to screenplays. Instead of holding back our ambitions, our marriage only kicked them into high gear. Her mother and brother eventually apologized and gave the marriage their support, and it was all good. Except for the photographers, who followed us fucking everywhere.

I didn’t really understand the paparazzi, because I had never experienced anything this crazy with Heather. Back then, the shit was more organized. With Pamela, it was a whole other level of stalking. Photographers would pop out of bushes when we left the house and start high-speed chases with us down the freeway. I couldn’t understand why people wanted so many pictures of her. Maybe if we were naked on the beach I’d understand, but what was so exciting about us walking down the street or getting out of our cars?

Everywhere we went, someone would yell “Pamela” or “Tommy,” and if we turned, a million flashbulbs went off. If we didn’t turn, they’d start booing and cussing us out. It became a sick game trying to invent elaborate schemes to avoid them: sending her assistant out of the house in a decoy blond wig or switching cars to throw them off our trail. After a few weeks of being treated like dog shit by the paparazzi, we started thinking of them as fucking maggots. I wanted to crush them all: it wasn’t so much the invasiveness as it was the lack of respect for us as human beings. When Pamela collapsed and lost our first child due to a miscarriage (a Lee family curse, my mother said), the paparazzi were so intent on getting photos, they kept cutting off the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Fuck, dude, I could deal with them trying to crash our parties, but trying to crash our ambulance was another story.

It bummed me out because I’d been wanting kids for so long. I was so jealous of Nikki because he had such beautiful fucking kids. Whenever I was at his place, I’d regress to a two-year-old and play with them for hours. I liked going back to that time in my life when everything was innocent and meaningless.

I was depressed for months after Pamela’s miscarriage. To cheer us up and get our minds off it, Pamela threw a fucking three-hundred-thousand-dollar surprise party when I turned thirty-three. I came home that night and she said, “I want you to dress like a king!”

She grabbed a big-ass purple robe and a crazy crown she had bought, then a makeup artist covered me with white face powder so that I looked like the Crow or something. Pamela dressed up as a ringleader in a big ol’ top hat, grabbed me by the hand, and led me to our driveway, where a tour bus covered with birthday banners had pulled up. Inside, there were nine midgets singing “Happy Birthday,” champagne was flowing, and a dozen of my friends were dressed in drag.

We rode for ten minutes to a nearby place called the Semler Ranch and I stepped off the bus into my own personal Fellini movie. Two rows of flames stretched out for hundreds of feet in front of me. Midgets were everywhere, saying, in their helium voices, “Welcome to Tommyland, welcome to Tommyland, hee-hee-hee,” as they unrolled a red carpet between the lines of fire. In the meantime, all kinds of clowns and acrobats materialized, filling the air with confetti. I wasn’t even on drugs yet, but I felt like I was.

Pamela, the ringleader, led me and my friends in a parade down the carpet. Ahead of us, a giant on stilts dressed as the devil walked through the tangle of midgets, parting them like a sea. Past him, there was a big sign that said “Tommyland” with a crazy-looking clown on it. As I approached the sign, I realized that Pamela had basically set up an entire amusement park for me. There were fucking Ferris wheels, roller coasters, contortionists in boxes, caged lions, and bubble machines. Underneath an immense tent, a professional concert stage had been loaded up with drums and all kinds of gear for a jam. Also on the stage was my baby grand piano, which Pamela had tricked-out with gold-leaf paintings of koi fish and customized wrought-iron legs. Fucking Slash and the Guns N’ Roses dudes were there, as was our friend Bobby of Orgy and his band at the time, the Electric Love Hogs. She brought in dudes from the Cirque du Soleil, which we loved, and cranked our favorite band, Radiohead, on the sound system. There were all kinds of gourmet food dishes, designer drugs, Tahitian dancers, Balinese percussionists, and moving lights, plus a crew with 35mm film and a sound truck to document it all. At 3
A.M.
she brought me a cake with fucking Mighty Mouse on it, because he always gets the girl, dude, and then we all played midget football on our knees.

It was an amazing fucking party from hell. But at the end of the night, when I was all shitty with drugs and alcohol, a dozen ambulances came screaming into the ranch. “What the fuck’s going on?” I panicked, grabbing Pamela.