The Dirt (67 page)

THE GUYS WERE STUCK THERE for eight hours waiting for a commercial flight. They ended up canceling their sold-out show in Boise and returning to L.A. Jordan Berliant at our management office kept calling me at home with Nikki on the line, but I refused to speak to him.

Finally, after a day or two of enjoying the freedom of doing whatever the fuck I wanted, I agreed to one of the meetings our managers seemed to like so much. We sat down in two swivel chairs in their offices, facing each other like preteen siblings forced by their parents to kiss and make up. Since Tommy and Nikki had kicked me out of the band on that rainy night six years ago, we had never really talked about our problems. We had just swept them under the carpet and ignored them, hoping they’d go away. But eventually, the carpet became too lumpy with all that dirt, and we kept tripping over it whenever we tried to walk. As we sat there, I finally had the chance to say the things to him that had been building up for those six years.

“Your problem is that you’re really condescending to people,” I told him. “You talk down to people, like they aren’t up to your level.”

“I guess I can be like that.”

“You can be such a snot to the guys in the band. Not just me: you treat Tommy like a baby and you pretend like Mick doesn’t even exist. You run this band like a fucking dictator, and everything always has to be done your way. But sometimes you don’t know everything; you were the one who made us look stupid in
Rolling Stone
because you didn’t know who Gary Hart was. It would help if you listened to other people.”

For an hour we sat there and ragged on each other.

“Then I want you to cut the bullshit,” he told me. “I can deal with the drinking. Maybe we can even stop the piss tests. But I don’t want you telling me you’re not going to drink, then moving the goalposts and going out drinking. I don’t want you lying to me and getting angry at me every time we talk about it. We’re out there covering your debts, and I don’t mind that. But then, when we’re getting in these stupid jive contests every night because you’re trying to hide stuff from us, it makes us resent you. Your lying is a lot worse for the health of this band than the drinking.”

“I’ll tell you what, then. I can promise you that I will never drink before a show or let it interfere with band business. But when I’m on my own time, you have to let me do whatever the fuck I want and not have some guy knocking on my door at 9
A.M.
with a urine jar. If you stop acting like a cop all the time, I’ll stop feeling like a prisoner and start being honest about it.”

“Okay,” he said. “And I’ll try to listen more and not be so condescending. Because I don’t always know what’s right for everybody. We’d be a better band anyway if we listened to each other. I’m sorry. I’ve been going through a lot lately.”

“That’s why we should be getting along and sticking together. Because the truth is that you’re all I have. You know me better than anyone in the world.”

Through six albums and countless tours, Nikki and I had always been so different: I was the laid-back beach bum who loved golfing and racing; he was the unhealthy secluded rocker who loved drugs and underground music. I liked to wear shorts and flip-flops, he was always in black leather and boots. But after that conversation, Nikki and I became best friends. We were inseparable. We finally came to truly like and understand one another after seventeen years, and since then we’ve always been able to keep each other in check. That fight was the best thing that ever happened to us.

The next day, we rescheduled the show in Boise, flew there in my very confused friend’s Gulfstream jet, and played the best set of the whole tour. After we wrapped up our last show, I gave the band the best present I could: I checked myself into rehab in Malibu and quit drinking.

I’m
going to stack everything up for you, dude:

Ever since Vince had returned to the band, I was unhappy with the direction we were going in, which was backward. And losing the support of our record label only made the situation more miserable. I have so much passion for music, dude, but when I went onstage I just didn’t feel it anymore. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t excited about what we were doing. I was trapped by what we were doing, and a drummer who feels like his hands are tied is no fucking good.

Then I’d just had my second child, and fatherhood doesn’t exactly come with a fucking instruction manual. I read some shit and tried to dive in and learn, but Pamela kept saying everything I did was wrong. I used to be at the top of the charts with Pamela. When Brandon was born, I dropped to number two because at that age, of course, a child needs his mom all the time. So I walked around like the invisible man. I’d say, “Hey, baby, what’s up? I love you.” And she’d just nod, not paying attention. I’d ask her to come down to the garage and listen to some new music I was working on; she’d promise to be there in a minute, then she’d completely forget. I couldn’t even have a conversation with her because she had her panties in a wad about the baby all the time.

Then, when Dylan was born, I dropped down to number three. Now I was full-on nonexistent. And I couldn’t deal with that. I’m a guy who loves to give love and loves to get love back. But at home, all I was doing was giving. I wasn’t getting jack back. Then, Pamela flew her parents down from Canada to help with the boys. It was great for the kids to have Grandma around, but the in-laws were at the house every fucking day at all hours, taking up more of Pamela’s time. So, unable to step back and see the situation from any reasonable perspective, I turned into a whiny, needy little brat. Maybe it was my way of becoming Pamela’s third child, so I’d get the attention I needed too. Now, all of a sudden, Pamela and I were arguing all the time. Our relationship had slowly degenerated from pure love to love-hate.

If my head had been clearer, I would have given her a break and fucking loved myself instead of looking to other people for affirmation. But old habits are hard to break: I’d spent my whole life looking for myself in other people, looking for them to tell me who I was. And once I let them define me, I became completely dependent on them, because without them, I didn’t exist.

On Valentine’s Day, when we should have been all about fucking love, we went to the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. I asked a florist to fill the room with rose petals, ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon, and set the perfect mood for our first night alone in months. But after a few glasses of champagne, Pamela became so worried about being away from the kids that she couldn’t even enjoy herself. All she could talk about was breast-feeding Dylan, and all I could think about was that it was my turn to be breast-fed. The next day we went to see the Rolling Stones play downstairs and it was all bad. She saw a stripper talking to me after the concert and we got in a huge-ass blowout in the middle of the casino. I grabbed her to take her into the room so the fucking gossip columns wouldn’t be filled with news of us fighting in public, and she went ballistic. Our anger kept escalating until she finally ran out of the hotel, took the car, and drove back to Malibu alone. Valentine’s Day was a fucking wash. I had to crawl back to the house on my hands and knees begging for mercy.

The week afterward, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner for Pamela and the kids. Everything was quiet and cool again, and we were splitting a glass of wine as I pulled a bunch of vegetables to stir-fry out of the refrigerator. I looked through the cabinets for a pan and couldn’t find one because the fucking housekeeper had our cooking shit scattered all over the place. I was so high-strung and tense that as soon as the littlest thing went wrong, I’d start to freak out like it was the end of the world. So when I couldn’t find the pan, I started slamming cabinet doors and throwing shit around, like a little baby crying for attention, hoping Mommy would come and solve all his problems. So Mommy—Pamela—came over, saw that I was in one of those moods, and just threw up her hands. “Calm down, it’s just a pan.”

But it wasn’t just a pan. It meant everything to me. My whole fucking peace of mind and sanity depended on me finding that pan. And by not caring whether I found the pan or not, Pamela, in my mind, was disrespecting my feelings. In my fucked-up, selfish way of thinking, it meant that Pamela didn’t understand me—the worst sin someone can commit in a relationship. I grabbed all the pots and mixing bowls I had pulled out, fucking threw them in the big open drawer I had taken them from, and screamed, “This is bullshit!”

And then Pamela said the words that you should never say to anyone who’s losing their temper, the words that only pour gasoline on the blaze: “Calm down. You’re scaring me.”

I should have walked outside and just vented at the stars, or gone for a long jog, or taken a cold shower. But I didn’t. I was too wrapped up in the moment, in my anger at the missing pan, which was really my anger at the miscommunication between Pamela and me, which all boiled down to nothing but my own insecurity, neediness, and fear.

“Fuck you! Fuck off! Leave me the fuck alone!” I yelled at her, kicking the drawer and hurting my fucking foot like an idiot because I had forgotten I was wearing soft slippers.

That was it. We were off and running. She screamed at me, I screamed back at her, and pretty soon the kids started screaming. Dylan was crying in his crib and I could hear Brandon in his bedroom, bawling. “Whaaaaah! Mommy! Daddy! What’s going on? Whaaaah!”

“I’ve had enough,” Pamela said as she ran to the crib and scooped up Dylan. She brought him into the living room, grabbed the phone, and started to dial.

“Who do you think you are calling?”

“I want my mom to come over. You’re scaring me.”

“Don’t call your mom. Put the fucking phone down. We can deal with this ourselves.”

“No, don’t try to stop me. And don’t swear in front of the kids. I’m calling them.”

“Your parents are here all the fucking time. This is so stupid. We can talk about this and be over it in one minute. Look at me: I’m calm now. I’m not mad anymore.”

“I’m calling Mom. And stop swearing.”

She dialed the numbers, and I hung up the phone. Then she turned and fixed me with that dirty look, the one that told me that I was mean and selfish, the one that reduced me to the ugliest, scrawniest worm on the face of the fucking planet. I fucking hated that look, because it meant that the situation was escalating out of my control and no amount of apologies or flowers would ever convince her that I was a good guy who loved her again. Her therapist had given her the stupid advice of ignoring me when I was angry, because according to him I received enough attention as a rock star. But what he didn’t know was that I was a rock star because I needed the attention. Silence equals death. So when Pamela started giving me the silent treatment—just like my parents used to—it only drove me further over the brink. In the meantime, Dylan was yelling in her arms and Brandon was howling louder and louder from his room.

She defiantly grabbed the phone again and dialed her parents. I slammed down the hang-up bar. “I said, ‘Don’t fucking call her!’ Come on. I’m sorry. This is so fucking petty.”

She threw the phone against the handset, clenched her fist, and swung at me blindly, connecting half her fist with my lower jaw and the other half with the tender part of my neck, which fucking hurt. I had never been hit by a woman before, and as soon as I felt the contact, I saw red. I had been trying so hard to defuse the situation, but when she kept getting madder at every turn, it only incensed me more. The more willing I was to calm down, the madder I became when she wouldn’t let me. So as soon as she slugged me, my emotional meter flew into the red and clouded my eyes. Like an animal, I did the first thing that instinctually came to mind to stop the situation. I grabbed her and held her firmly. “What is fucking wrong with you?” I yelled, not letting go. And once again, my attempt to calm her only panicked her more. Now she was crying, the kids were freaking out, and the phone was ringing off the hook because her parents were worried because of all the cut-off phone calls. My stir-fry had turned into a nightmare.