The Dirt (68 page)

As I held her, the silent treatment ended. She yelled every shitty thing she could think of at me, called me every dirty name in the book, stabbed at every one of my weak points. I never could have imagined when we stared at each other all night at Señor Frog’s that it would end up like this, with us crying and screaming at each other like demons. I released her, and she began to run toward Brandon’s bedroom, as if she was the loving mother who needed to protect her brood from their cruel father. As she ran past, I swung my foot after her and helped her on her way with a swift, slippered boot to her ass. “You are a fucking bitch!”

“You’re mean!”

I followed her. I hated fighting in front of the kids. It was hard enough trying to raise them with paparazzi everywhere; the least we could do is set a healthy example as parents. I sulked toward Brandon’s room to talk to him. But she had picked him up and was shielding him as he cried.

“Let go of him,” I said. “I’m going to take him outside. Do you want to go see the frogs, Brandon?”

Our backyard pond had suddenly filled with frogs over the winter, and I thought it would be a good place to breathe deep and chill out. “Get out of here!” she screamed hysterically.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to take him out to the frogs so that he can calm down. You stay with Dylan so you two can calm down. Everyone just needs to stop screaming.”

But everyone kept screaming, except Pamela, who wasn’t speaking to me again, which made it impossible to resolve anything.

I took Brandon’s hand, and she pulled him away from me. Suddenly, we were wrestling over him and everyone was getting mental again. No matter what I did, the situation just escalated. As I wrested Brandon from her, I pushed her and she tumbled backward into a little blackboard covered with chalk drawings our kids had made. She tried to catch herself on the blackboard with her hands, but the face of the board swiveled forward and she broke her nail.

Before she could finish yelling, I had taken Brandon by the hand and walked outside with him. I took him to the frog pond and sat him down. As he sniffled, I told him that Mommy and Daddy loved each other very much, and we loved him very much. I promised that we would never get angry and raise our voices again if it scared him. I picked up a mellow little frog and cupped him in my hands. As my hands closed around him, he started struggling and flailing. “That’s how Daddy feels sometimes. That’s why it’s good to go outside, breathe the fresh air, and clear your head.”

After we both calmed down and dried our tears, we headed back inside. I tried to find Pamela to apologize and suggest ordering some dinner. I searched every room downstairs and couldn’t find her. I brought Brandon to his playroom and, as I sat him down with his toys, I heard voices behind me. I turned around to see two cops standing there.

“Turn back around, Mr. Lee,” they barked at me.

“For what?”

“Turn around.”

It was like the Bobbie Brown incident all over again. Here were two cops who were going to arrest me no matter what I said. If it takes two people to get into an argument, why am I always the only one getting arrested?

I turned around and felt cold metal wrap around my hands, followed by two clicks. “You’re handcuffing me? Are you fucking kidding me? Handcuff her too. She hit me in the face.”

“We don’t care, Mr. Lee.”

“But…”

They led me downstairs, past the living room (where I saw Pamela sitting with her parents), out the front door, and into the back of the squad car. Then they left me there alone while they went back inside to question Pamela. I relaxed when I realized that they were probably just separating us so they could question us in private. I probably wasn’t going to be taken to jail. An hour later, the officers stepped out of the house. One of the cops was carrying a Civil War–era pistol that I had on the wall as decoration and, when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew they were going to somehow twist the antique into a firearm possession charge, which violated a probation sentence I had picked up four years ago after I packed a semiautomatic pistol in my travel bag and stupidly carried it through an airport metal detector.

Wordlessly, the cops climbed into the car and backed out of the driveway. “Hey, where are you going?” I asked, panicked.

“You’re going downtown.”

Again, I felt a situation that should have been easy to deal with spiraling out of my control into something that was going to be a real pain in the ass. “Dude, you guys didn’t even talk to me yet. You are only listening to her side of the story. What about my side?”

They didn’t say a word. They just ignored me and kept driving. And, bro, I just fucking rammed my head into the wire mesh separating the front of the car from the backseat. I kept bashing it against the wire helplessly, yelling, “Why won’t you fucking listen to me? Fucking talk to me!” I had turned into a child again, because I was being given the silent treatment. And silence equals death.

fig. 4

Mug shot

T
ommy used to call from jail in tears every day. Separated from his kids and wife, he was in agony. As angry as he was at Pamela for pressing spousal assault charges and sticking him with a six-month sentence, he still wanted her back so badly. But she kept toying with him, driving him out of his mind. He would pour out his heart in letters to her every day, none of which he’d ever show us.

The worst part for the band was losing Tommy at such a critical juncture in our dispute with Elektra. In addition, Vince was having major money problems and we had scheduled a tour independent of the label to bail him out, because if he couldn’t get together a lump sum for his creditors, they were going to foreclose on his—and thus our—assets. If Tommy stayed in jail for a full six months, however, the tour would be canceled at our expense, Vince would be destitute, and Elektra would have us vulnerable and right where it wanted us. As much as any of us, Tommy needed this tour because the money would help him pay his legal bills and support his children. But Tommy’s mind was so far removed from such matters: all he could think about was trying to get back to the domestic bliss that was life with Pamela Anderson—even though she had already started divorce proceedings and hadn’t visited him once. As far as Tommy was concerned, however, Mötley Crüe was over, a closed chapter.

Every girl does the same thing to a young band. They always say, “You’re the most popular” or “You’re the cutest one” or “You’re the one everyone talks about.” With older, more experienced bands, the women have to get more subtle. They say, “Those guys are holding you back” or “You should be getting more money” or “They’re not treating you with enough respect.” And every time, the guy will say, “Really? Do you think so?” They don’t have the balls to say, “Shut the fuck up! We are a fucking gang, and we’ve been a gang since the beginning. So please stay out of it!”

This happens because every girl wants her guy to be “the guy,” and every guy wants to hear from a girl that he is “the guy.” And so what happens afterward is that when one guy driving the band says “left,” the henpecked guy will say, “No, let’s go right.” He won’t really want to go right, but he’ll want to assert himself as the leader. Every band is the same: the drugs, the women, the ego. All three of them prey on you and destroy your group. And, after getting over the drugs, the women and the egos were destroying us.

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” Tommy said. “Why would I want to tour just to pay for Vince’s mistakes?” The touring was about more than Vince and his pocketbook; it was also about getting Tommy out of jail. We had every promoter in the country writing the judge letters about the financial straits they’d be in if Tommy’s jail term forced the cancellation of dates.

So I told Tommy, like I had a million times before, that he could do both: start his own band and play in Mötley Crüe. That’s what I was doing with my side project, 58 (a collaboration with David Darling, who happened to be married to Brie Howard, which made him my ex–stepfather-in-law).

“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “Being on the road with Mötley Crüe is going to be a hell of a lot safer than being at home with Pamela Anderson.”

As I visited Tommy in jail each week, I wondered why I had never done the same for Vince when he was serving time after the Razzle accident. He was my brother and bandmate too, but back then I was too addicted and self-indulgent to think about anyone else. I called Vince and said, “You know what sucks? That I’ve been to visit Tommy a dozen times in jail, and I never went to visit you once.”

“It’s okay,” Vince said. “You were really fucked up back then.”

“It’s not okay with me,” I said. “It was a miserable time for you, and we weren’t there for you. We had just completed the most successful tour a young rock band had ever gone out on. We had just enjoyed the best times of our lives together. And when you went to jail, we dropped you like a hot sack of shit.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Vince said. “Everything ended up okay.”

“I don’t know if it did,” I said. “I don’t know if it did.”

That night, Vince and I decided to spend some time together. There was a party at the Playboy Mansion and we pulled in after midnight. When we walked in, a friend named Dennis Brody ran up to us. He said Pam had just been at the party, getting very friendly with her ex-boyfriend, a surfer named Kelly Slater, in the middle of the game room with dozens of people watching.