The Dirt (65 page)

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I hired ambulances to take everyone home because I knew they’d all get too fucked up to drive.” At 7
A.M.
, I was brought into my bedroom on a big-ass stretcher.

I always told her that one day when I wasn’t in a rock band anymore and she was through with acting, we would start a party-planning company. She scored such amazing satisfaction from pulling off crazy, elaborate parties that ran without a hitch.

Ten days after my birthday, Pamela told me that she was four weeks pregnant. I couldn’t have been any happier, dude. We wanted to have a completely natural, drug-free home birth. We didn’t want any fucking ugly hospital lights and none of that butt-slapping, stainless-steel-scale-weighing, needle-poking attitude you get in a maternity ward. With soft music, candlelight, and a midwife on either side of her, Pamela gave birth to Brandon Thomas Lee at 3:02
A.M.
, on May 6, 1996, after seventeen hours of labor for her and four hundred cigarettes for me. The tears came flooding out when I saw this fucking person come out of my wife right in the fucking master bedroom where we conceived him. I even got to help pull him out, dude. That was hands-down the most golden day of my life, and half an hour later I sat down at the piano and the song “Brandon” just came out of me.

I didn’t realize it at the time because I was so overjoyed, but there was a downside to all this. Pamela and I got busy having kids so quickly that we never gave ourselves a chance to build a solid relationship. When you combine the time that it takes to be a parent with the time we both devote to our careers, there’s hardly a minute left. I asked her much later, “Why didn’t we work on our relationship more?”

“We couldn’t,” she replied. “I was pregnant the whole time.”

When you’re in love with someone, there’s nothing you want to do more than create a baby that’s equal parts you and her. But once you do, you are consigning your love to the trash bin. Because in having a child, you are creating your greatest rival, a person your wife is going to love more than you. Where a husband-and-wife relationship is all about conditions (contracts, marriage licenses, blood tests), a mother–child relationship is all about unconditional love. In both getting what we wanted more than anything in the world, a beautiful boy (and soon after, a second son), we doomed ourselves before we even started.

Then, there were other factors beyond our control. Pamela and I were chowing down on some dinner and flipping through television stations when we heard our names being mentioned on some news show. On the screen, there was a dude at Tower Video stocking the shelves with videotapes. And we knew just what they were.

Months earlier, we had taken a five-day houseboat trip on Lake Mead as a vacation. As usual, I brought along my video camera. We weren’t trying to make a porno, just to document our vacation. We watched it once when we returned home, then put it in our safe. The safe was a five-hundred-pound monstrosity hidden underneath a carpet in my studio control room in the garage, where we recorded part of
Generation Swine
.

Pamela and I spent that Christmas in London while some work was being done on the house. Afterward, I finished recording in the basement and then dismantled the studio. When the carpet was torn out, I saw nothing but empty space where the safe had once been. There were no broken locks or windows, so it had to have been an inside job. The only people with the keys were my assistant and the construction crew, which, come to think of it, included an electrician who used to be a porn star and knew that business pretty well. The way I figured it, they must have removed the safe with a crane, taken it back to one of their houses, and had it picked or blown open. They were probably after the guns and jewelry in there, but they also ended up with everything personal that was important to us, from family heirlooms to photographs.

I was so freaked out that I fired the assistant and sic’ed my lawyers on the construction company. The next thing I knew there was a porn peddler from a company called the Internet Entertainment Group phoning me. He said he had bought the tape and was going to broadcast it on the Internet. We had Pamela’s lawyers send them a cease and desist order, but for some reason it didn’t arrive on time. Our lawyers and managers advised us that the best way to minimize the damages was to sign a contract saying that, since the company had us by the balls, we would reluctantly allow a onetime Webcast so long as they didn’t sell, copy, trade, or rebroadcast it. We thought we had won: Hardly anyone would see the video on the Internet, and we could recover the tape and start over.

So as soon as we saw the shelves being stocked at Tower on the news, we realized the guy had breached his agreement and mass-produced the tape, which, by the way, he never returned to us. I instantly called my lawyer and we took them to court.

All of this was going down at a real hard time for us: Pamela and I were getting in fights all the time. Trying to have children, continue the careers that consumed us, make a new relationship work, and deal with the nonstop barrage of bullshit in the press was more of a challenge than we ever could have expected.

Before Brandon was born, we had a huge blowup because, with everything unraveling at once, we both became extrasensitive to each other’s slightest change in mood. If one person said or did something wrong, the other one bristled with hate and resentment. We had little tiffs over nothing all the time. “You are a selfish little baby who thinks of nobody but himself,” Pamela fumed one night over some little thing we had pumped into a major issue. I can’t even remember what it was anymore.

“I do not want to deal with this,” I snapped back. “It doesn’t fucking matter. I am so sick of wasting our time arguing.”

“You never want to talk about anything,” she fumed. “I used to think you were so sweet. You tricked me.” And with that, she stormed out of the house and went to spend the night at her condo. Hours later, the phone rang. I picked it up, expecting to hear Pamela on the other end. But, instead, a man started speaking. He identified himself as a doctor and said Pamela had swallowed half a bottle of aspirin at her place and blacked out. She was found unconscious on her bed by a girlfriend who had come over to spend the night and console her. I rushed to the hospital to see her, though the overdose was probably less a suicide attempt than a plea for attention. But it worked, because I had no idea how much our disagreements were affecting her.

To throw the newshounds off the scent but give them something real to report, we issued a press statement announcing that Pamela had checked into the hospital with what she thought were flu symptoms only to discover that she was pregnant.

I tried my best to keep my cool after the drama. But it kept getting harder while the news kept getting worse. First, the Internet Entertainment Group started selling a tape of Pamela having sex with Bret Michaels from Poison. Then, the judge in our video case shut Pamela and me down on every privacy issue and allowed the sale of the tape because he ruled that the content was newsworthy. It pissed me off because I don’t ever want my kids to go to a friend’s house and find a video of their parents fucking in the VCR.

I finally broke down and watched the thing. I couldn’t see the big deal: It’s really just our vacation tape. There’s only a little bit of fucking on there. That hasn’t stopped Ron Jeremy, though, from trying to get me to make a fuck flick for him. I guess if my career as a musician ever fails, I can always be a porn star.

fig. 3

Tommy with son Dylan

“Hi,
I’m calling for Randy. I believe that you are my half brother. If your father is Frank Feranna, could you please call me? I don’t know if he is dead or alive. My mother was Deana. And my name is Nikki, or Frank.”

That was the message I left Randy Feranna. An hour later, his wife called me back and said that she vaguely remembered his father mentioning a half brother. I talked to Randy later that night. He was four years older than me, ran a vacation resort in San Jose, and had grown up on Mötley Crüe records, though he had no idea he was banging his head to the music of a blood relation.

“I knew of a lady named Deana,” he said, “and I heard she had a son with my dad. But he never mentioned you. My dad—our dad—was a womanizer and a raging alcoholic. He was a wild man, I’ve been told.”

“But is he alive?” I asked. “I want to talk to him.”

“He died on Christmas Day. In 1987. He had a heart attack in the shower.”

Randy told me that our father was buried in San Jose. I had really wanted to meet my dad after all these years, to just look at him and find out more about who I was, what I would become, and even what diseases I was genetically prone to. Most of all, I wanted to know why he never wanted to have anything to do with me my whole life. Since he was dead and buried, I figured that was the end of that. I was probably better off not finding him alive because I only would have been rebuked again and further embittered. I remembered all the optimistic thoughts I entertained when I flew to Seattle to reunite with my mother, only to find a paranoid woman in a mental hospital who would never forgive me and who I could never forgive.