Full Disclosure

FIVE

It was a Saturday morning, and I was already in heels and a sexy cop costume, chasing Adam Levine through the sketchiest part of downtown L.A. This was July 7, 2007, a few weeks before Shark Week. I was hired to appear in the Maroon 5 video for “Wake Up Call,” the second single off their second album. Jonas Åkerlund was directing it as a trailer for a fake NC-17 film starring Adam as a guy covering up a murder. Jonas had already directed videos for Madonna, the Rolling Stones, U2, and Metallica, so it was pretty awesome to be on the set.

“Can I get a gun?” I asked the props guy.

“No,” he said.

“How about a Taser?” I said.

“Nope,” he said.

Thunder and Lightning would have to be intimidating enough. It was such a big video, complete with a car exploding, that the head of the label, James Diener, came to the set. A little under six feet tall, with a shaved head, James is a New Yorker and natural-born talent scout.

“Hey, you direct, right?” he asked me during a down moment.

“Yes,” I said.

“I have this really cool idea,” he said. “I have this new band I just signed, completely different vibe than Maroon 5. They’re still working on the album, but it would be pretty sensational if you directed their video.”

At that point, directing a music video was on my wish list. I had been watching everything Jonas did on set. This seemed like my way into that world.

“What’s the name of the band?” I asked.

“Hollywood Undead.”

A couple of weeks later, James emailed me the unmastered version of what would be the band’s debut album, Swan Songs. “I think the first single is going to be ‘Undead,’” he wrote. I played it, ready to start thinking of visuals. And I hated it. There was no way I was going to direct this as my first video. Fortunately, the album kept getting pushed back, all the way to September 2008, and then the date they chose to shoot the video changed to a time when I would be directing a film. By then I had married Mike Moz and realized that I needed to figure a way out of that because it just wasn’t working. He had been a great motivator in business but was a nonstarter as a husband. I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t she learn from the first marriage? Believe me, I asked myself that same question. The problem was that he was so enmeshed in my business that it would take some time for me to get out.

“I have a lot on my plate right now,” I told James.

“Well, could you be one of the girls in the video?” James asked me. They needed someone to make out with the lead singer.

“Sorry, no,” I said.

The finished album was a hit, especially with tweens. It’s rap rock, with the band members all having pseudonyms like J-Dog and wearing spooky masks. It wasn’t my style, but I just kept hearing about them, whether it was a girlfriend saying she was auditioning for one of their videos or dating one of the guys from the band. It became a running joke, and I’d roll my eyes every time I heard the band mentioned yet another time.

I was living in Tampa and I had a friend there named Kayvon Sarfehjooy, a DJ and producer. On April 9, 2009, he called me to tell me his friend’s band was playing 98Rockfest the following night at the St. Pete Times Forum, now called the Amalie Arena.

“They get in tonight, and you should come out,” she said. “They’re scene kids from Hollywood. You could direct their video.”

That got my interest. By then I had directed the “Ballad of Billy Rose” video for a band called 16 Second Stare. “What’s their name?”

“Hollywood Undead,” he said.

“What the fuck?”

“It’s a cool name,” he said.

“The universe just keeps trying to make this happen,” I said.

“Make what happen?”

“Fuck if I know,” I said.

Kayvon thought I would hit it off with Jorel Decker, the aforementioned J-Dog, but it was also a chemistry test with the band. Now that they were popular, I was interested in directing their next video. We met up at a club across the street from the arena. It was a small place, but not so small that it could hide that it was dead on a Thursday night. It was a Tampa club trying to look Miami, with clean lines and white lacquer. We got a table and the band got me a bottle of champagne. I wore a white dress, so I looked like I was doing some sort of camouflage with the white tables and couches. I could see what Kayvon meant about them being sceney. They were dressed nice for supposedly hard rockers.

Girls started arriving, and they were all over the band. I wasn’t looking to hook up with anyone—I was still looking to get rid of Moz—so that was the end of my conversation with Jorel. He got up and was talking to a blonde. So, I sat on the couch, the only one left sitting at the table because all the guys got up to hit on the women. I texted for reinforcements, and a girlfriend, Amanda, said she would come. In the meantime, I would just people-watch—take in the mating dance of rockers and hot girls.

Two guys walked in and went straight to the bar for drinks. Neither was dressed up, and one guy especially looked like a bum. He had a white Iron Maiden T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, shorts, and Vans slip-ons. After he’d downed a tequila, I caught him turning to look at me quickly before turning back to the bartender. He had two more shots, then wandered over to where I was sitting alone on the couch. He looked even filthier up close, but handsome. He had long brown hair, tattoos all up and down his arms, and gauges in his ears, which I’d never seen before. A rocker guy with a soccer player body.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” I said, my tone in keeping with the international code for “Not interested.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

I reached for the champagne and held it up as answer.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

He came around the table to sit right next to me and then asked, “Is anybody sitting here?”

I turned to look at both ends of the long empty couch. “Nope.”

“Hi, I’m Glen,” he said.

“Stormy.”

“I’m the drummer for Hollywood Undead,” he said.

“That’s cool.”

“So, what do you do?”

“Oh, that’s cute,” I said. “We’re gonna play that game.” I was so pompous about it, but in my defense, I knew that the band knew they were coming to meet Stormy Daniels about directing the video. But in his defense, he was the drummer. And bands don’t tell the drummer anything. I realized he had no idea who I was, so I felt bad. I told him about my work with Wicked and he was completely unfazed. “Oh, that’s cool,” he said.

My friend Amanda arrived, and as she walked over I could see her taking note of all the slick band members—and the homeless guy next to me. She cocked her head, as if to say, “Um, excuse me, what are you doing?”

“This is Glen,” I said. “Drummer.”

She nodded, not offering her name. Suddenly Kayvon came over. “Hey, they want to get out of here,” he said.

“Um, no surprise,” I said. “There’s nobody here.”

“Do you think you can get us into the Penthouse Club?”

“You walk in the door and there’s an eight-foot poster of me, so it would be pretty embarrassing if I couldn’t,” I said. I was on the February 2007 Penthouse cover. Plus, I knew the owner. “Let’s go,” I said, already switching into hosting mode.

In the parking lot, the guys all paired off with the girls and everyone was climbing in cars. Except Glen, who looked like a lost puppy. He had cabbed it over and didn’t fit in anybody’s car. I was getting into Amanda’s car, which was a really beautiful white Mercedes.

“Do you need a ride?” I called to Glen.

As he turned, Amanda hissed at me. “He is not getting in my car,” she said through a closed smile.

“Come on,” I said.

“Dude,” she whispered to me. “I just had it detailed.”

“He’s harmless,” I said.

“Dirty,” she said.

“Here, Drummer Boy,” I yelled to Glen, overruling her. “Get in.”

The Penthouse Club is a study in neon and black, bright pinks and blues highlighting the bodies of the best strippers in town. When I turn into host, I’m like a cross between a cruise director and a dominatrix. You will have fun on my watch. I was talking to all the guys because I was trying to get the directing gig, but something kept bringing me back to Glen. He was constantly needing to find a place where he could smoke, so I would lead him places. If he wanted me alone, he had more game than I gave him credit for.

“You looked like an angel at that club,” he said, exhaling smoke up and away from my face. I laughed.

“No, serious,” he continued. “I turned around and saw you all in white on this white couch. There was a spotlight on you and I thought, I gotta go talk to that girl.”

He was dirty because he’d missed his first flight and had come straight from band practice. He said he’d done the tequila shots to get the nerve to say hi. He didn’t even like tequila and was more of a vodka guy. He’d been in bands right out of high school, living on the road with one band after another. We were both refugees of the road, and I began to feel that familiar feeling of wanting to look after someone. It creeps on me and I just think, Oh, shit.

“What’s your favorite band?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t know them.”

“I’m a musician,” he said. “I like all kinds of music. What, is it country?”

“No.”

“Try me,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette. “And you better not say Hollywood Undead.”

“Trust me, Drummer Boy, no,” I said, moving closer to Glen to make way for a couple of guys taking their drunk friend home.

“Why are you so sure I’ve never heard of them?”

“Because they’re a local band from Baton Rouge, where I’m from,” I said. “They broke up while I was in high school.”

“Why did they break up?” Glen asked.

“The bass player got killed and they never got a new one.”

He got a look on his face that I couldn’t quite read. “What if I do know what this band is?”

“If you know this band,” I said, “we are totally going to get married and have a baby one day.”

“Now you have to try me.”

“Acid Bath.”

He started singing, low, a smile creeping onto his face. “A creature made of sunshine, her eyes were like the sky…” he sang. It was one of my favorite Acid Bath songs, “Scream of the Butterfly.”

“Great,” I said, “now I’m stuck with you.”

We went back inside, just before the Penthouse Club stopped serving alcohol. The other guys in the band started to leave, but I didn’t want the night to end. I suggested that the next county over served alcohol later, and basically browbeat Amanda into driving us to the bar at the Hard Rock Casino.

We sat at the bar until four or five in the morning, with Amanda our over-it chaperone. She was miserable, cradling her head in her hands and absently eating peanuts left on the bar. Every bit of her body language said, Can we go now?

No.

“Are you coming to the show tomorrow?” he asked.

“No.”

“That’s a bummer,” he said.

“Yeah, real bummer,” said Amanda. “Listen, it’s five o’clock. I’m gonna go pee, and then I’m leaving with you or without you.”

As she trudged off, Glen leaned in toward me. “We should exchange numbers and keep in touch,” he said.

“It’s a waste of time,” I said. “It’s never gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

“You and I live the same life,” I said. “We’re each like that thousand-to-one person that people meet, but every person is a thousand to us because we meet so many people. We say, ‘Oh, keep in touch’ every single night and we never mean it. Everyone gives us a card, we give our number, but we never have any intention of answering the text or ever talking again.”

“But what if I promised to call you?”

“Okay, Drummer Boy,” I said. “No. Our lives are just too complicated.”

We left, and Amanda dropped me off first. I slipped away, doing a Cinderella rush out of the car with a quick wave. Good-bye, Drummer Boy.

And I was fine with that, until I was sitting in a nail salon the next day. As the nail tech did my nails, I was seized with this one thought: I have to see that guy again. I had this impulse to jump up and run to find him, like some crazy heroine in a movie, but I didn’t even know this guy’s last name. My adrenaline was surging, and it felt like the universe had given me a chance at something after giving me all those hints about Hollywood Undead. I had fucked up. And when you screw up and need help, you call a lawyer.

My entertainment attorney was a guy named Mark, who I knew represented Disturbed, a band that would also be at that night’s 98Rock show.

I’m sure I sounded like I was a hostage. “Mark, I need to get into the Disturbed show.”

“Done,” he said. “I’ll take you.” He drove in from the opposite coast of Florida and got us tickets and wristbands. Once I got in, it was like Not Without My Drummer. I just started asking everybody if they knew Glen, not knowing that he didn’t go by Glen in the band. Anyone affiliated with Hollywood Undead, with their silly nicknames, all just knew him as Biscuitz. Finally, they came onstage to play.

They were even worse than I remembered.

It was early, so the place wasn’t packed. I was near the front, so he spotted me. He pointed a drumstick at me and smiled. The music wasn’t for me, but he is such a gifted drummer. It shone through to me. As soon as they were done, he came and grabbed me.

“Drummer Boy!” I yelled.

“Come backstage,” he said. “I need to finish breaking down my kit.”

“I can’t go back there,” I said. “I don’t have a laminate.”

He handed me his laminate, which was on his key chain. “Don’t lose this, it has my house keys,” he said.

“Did we just move in together?” I joked.

My attorney, having safely secured the drummer, was busy seeing to some of his clients. Glen and I hung out backstage, eating catering. It was like being back with Pantera. Running away with the circus. Vinnie and Rex from Pantera, Slayer’s Kerry King, and, of course, Wookie…

“Now can I have your number?” Glen asked me. “Because I could have gotten you your own laminate, you know.”

So we exchanged numbers. He didn’t have his phone, so I wrote it on a slip of paper and put it in his pocket. Hollywood Undead needed to get on the bus for the next show. “Why don’t you just wait on the bus with me until we leave,” he asked. “I promise I won’t kidnap you.”

I agreed, and he stepped aside to let me get on the bus first. As I climbed in, I heard it.

“Stormy?”

I looked up, and there he was. Wookie. Of all the tour managers in the world, it had to be one I’d fucked on a tour stop at the Ritz.

“Oh, God,” I said. “Hi, Wookie.”

“How long has it been?” he asked, giving me a hug.

“Eight years,” I said. Glen came in behind me, and Wookie gave him a nod of respect. Glen and I sat for a few minutes more in the lounge in the front, and then it was time to roll out. I handed him back his laminate.

“Here’s your house keys,” I said.

“I’ll call you,” he said.

He didn’t. And I certainly wasn’t going to call him. I’m a fucking lady, thank you. Two weeks went by, and I was in New York City for a dance booking. Moz and I were definitely separated now, and I was happy to be anywhere but Tampa, where I was letting him continue to live while he found work and got back on his feet. My roadie, Dwayne, couldn’t work on the last night of the New York gig, so I was all alone in my hotel after the gig. It was about three in the morning, and I was eating Chinese takeout of sweet and sour chicken in my shitty hotel room.

I was lonely, and I looked at my phone. “Who would be awake right now?” I asked the empty room.

“Musicians,” I answered myself.

All performers, whether they’re dancers or musicians, are wired after a gig. On tour, Bus Call, the time you absolutely have to be on the bus every night, is usually between midnight and 3 A.M. Tour managers post a big piece of paper backstage listing the times for loading, catering info, what time you go onstage. And the very last thing is always the Bus Call in bold. That time is sacred, because they will leave without you.

When you get on the bus, you’re spent but still wide awake. You’re too wired still from being onstage in front of all those people and taking in all their energy.

So I just fired off a text before I could overthink it. “How’s my Drummer Boy doing?” I literally dropped my phone, like it was on fire, not sure if I had just made a fool of myself. It buzzed with a text.

“Please tell me this is Stormy,” said the message.

“Yes,” I typed back, grinning.

Glen called immediately. He had written my number down and the last four digits had gotten blurred. He was on tour, and he told me he had been desperate to get in touch with me. We talked for the rest of the night and only stopped when I saw the sun begin to rise over Manhattan.

Any good old-time romance story has a moment where the hero gets drafted, right? Well, here goes.

In early February, one of my friends back home in Baton Rouge had sent me an email with the all-caps subject: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?! It was a link to DraftStormy.com, a political movement asking me to run to represent Louisiana in the United States Senate. To convey my political bona fides, the site bragged that “at the age of seventeen, she was made editor of her high school newspaper, in addition to serving as president of her school’s 4-H club, a service-oriented organization sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture.”

I was furious. I mean, the 4-H club thing was real and I’m damn proud of it, but someone was using my name and my image to further their political agenda without my permission. I am not political, and it’s funny that most people don’t even know that I’m a Republican. I tracked down the guy who started the campaign, Brian Welsh, and called him to tear into him. There was a lot of cussing, but it amounted to “I own the trademark to ‘Stormy Daniels’ and ‘Stormy’ in relation to things involving me and I am going to sue you to hell.”

Brian let me go on for a long time, then finally said, “You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry I handled this wrong. I didn’t mean to insult or offend you. Let me explain myself.”

“Five minutes,” I said.

“Have you been keeping up with Louisiana politics?”

I was embarrassed that I had to say no. I’d been living in Florida and mainly on the road when I wasn’t filming in L.A.

“Well, do you know who David Vitter is?” he asked. Republican senator David Vitter, a married dad of four, had successfully run on a staunchly antigay, antichoice, “family values” platform in 2005, only to have his name turn up on the list of Washington, D.C., madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey. There were unconfirmed rumors from Hustler’s Larry Flynt that Vitter’s kink involved a diaper fetish. He apologized for his “sin,” and I’m not judging that, but it made him a hypocrite. I hate hypocrites.

“Okay, I’m in,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

Brian flew me to New Orleans to meet him and introduced me to his team of political science geeks. He was in his late thirties, with brown hair and a Southern drawl. We talked, and even as his team filled me in on issues, I was adamant that I didn’t want to run.

“Yeah, but this is great PR for you,” said Brian.

“I’m not doing it for the PR, either,” I said. “I don’t want to make a mockery of the election process and political life.” But I figured that if I could use my name to highlight topics like Planned Parenthood and sex education—which I am very passionate about—and expose this guy as a hypocrite who was not good for the average Louisiana resident, then I would. The Stormy Daniels Senate Exploratory Committee was up and running, and we even had a campaign slogan: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing People Honestly.” My endgame, and I said as much on national interviews with the likes of CNN, was to inspire someone more qualified to step up to the plate.

I started a listening tour in May, traveling the state to get a sense of the concerns of Louisiana residents. At the first stop, I didn’t think anyone was going to show up, and the place was mobbed. “For those of you who don’t know who I am,” I said at one of the many lunch places I stopped in, “I’d suggest that you don’t google that until you get home from work.” It was a lot like going to clubs for feature dancing. I was honest, I showed up on time, and I was respectful of the people who came out to see me.

It was fun at first. People thought I was going to be an idiot, and here I was able to string a sentence together. “If you get any closer you’re going to have to start tipping me,” I told the reporters who hung on every zinger. The press interest gave me the opportunity to spew some stats I knew about the dangers of defunding sex education and the corresponding rise in rates of STDs and teen pregnancy. “If you don’t want people to have the right to choose abortion,” I said, “then you have to give them sex education. You can’t have it both ways.” And when I didn’t know the answer, I didn’t hide it. “Honestly, I’m a porn star, I don’t know the answer to that question. Yet.”

I thought it would just set the campaign up for someone else, but people started writing campaign checks, and I was going up in the polls. Vitter would not debate me or even acknowledge my existence, and I just loved that he was scared of me.

Still, I walked a very fine line of not trying to make a mockery of the process or appearing that I was only doing it to further my name. Yes, I did have a spike in my website views, but I didn’t want to do a Senator Stormy video for Wicked.

One of my lines on the tour was “Politics can’t be any dirtier of a job than the one I am already in.” But I was wrong. I realized two weeks in that, just like the entertainment business but with way more repercussions, it’s about who you know and it’s about money. Vitter’s war chest was estimated at two million dollars. Right there was the real civics lesson: The person most qualified to represent the average resident of his or her state could never afford to run. Which means they will never win. Which means the people will never have true representation. It’s why we are stuck with a Congress full of millionaires. I started to get disheartened and was actually depressed for a while about that. Here I was, just doing this until an adult showed up, but what if there were no more honest grown-ups in politics?

Glen and I had continued talking every day for hours over the course of several weeks, leading up to the band’s five-week tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. In the olden days of the summer of 2009, you couldn’t use your American cell phone in Europe. He figured out we could do an audio version of a Skype call, and despite the time difference, we kept up with the daily calls. He would tell me where he was, Leeds and Wolverhampton in England, Glasgow in Scotland. I remember thinking that I knew someone who went on and on about Scotland, and then remembered Donald Trump and his stupid golf course. It didn’t occur to me to mention him to Glen. Now that he’d finally stopped calling, Donald Trump was nowhere on my radar.

About three weeks into his overseas tour, Glen confessed something. “Would it be crazy if I told you that I missed you?” he asked.

We had only seen each other twice ever, and we hadn’t even kissed. So, on paper, yes, file under crazy. But I missed him, too. “No,” I said.

“Good, because I miss you,” he said, sighing into the phone. “You should come to Europe.”

“I’ll come to Europe, don’t tempt me.”

It became like a dare. He clearly didn’t think I would just hop on a plane to see him. But maybe he knew the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t.

I knew he was playing the last day of Pinkpop, a famous three-day festival held at Landgraaf in the Netherlands. Because it’s outdoors, the venue can hold something like sixty thousand people, and Bruce Springsteen opened that weekend in 2009. Hollywood Undead were on the final night, Monday, June 1, on the tent stage with acts like the All-American Rejects and Katy Perry.

I hung up and bought a five-thousand-dollar plane ticket to Belgium. It was as close as I could get to Landgraaf, which can host such a big festival because it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere. I danced Friday and Saturday nights in Pittsburgh, then sent my luggage home with my roadie and went directly from the club for a 6 A.M. flight.

My adrenaline and “I’ll show you” energy had been pumping, so I didn’t think about what I had done until they closed the cockpit doors. This was crazy for me. Christ, what if I got there and I just hated this guy? What if this was only working because it was all on the phone and all in my head? And then I’d be trapped there for four days. On a bus with a band. What was I thinking?

When we landed in Brussels, I had a car pick me up to take me the hour-and-a-half drive to Landgraaf for the Pinkpop festival. It was only when I got out with my suitcase and saw this massive arena surrounded by a fence that I remembered one little detail: I didn’t have a ticket. People pay hundreds of euros for tickets, and they buy them way in advance. The weekend was sold out, as it had been the year before and the year before that. But I had to get in there.

I scanned the area and spotted a low part of the fence. I threw my suitcase over, scaled the fence, and just took off running. I heard security behind me, yelling as they chased me.

I looked back as they were gaining on me, and I saw a golf cart racing toward me. At the wheel was Brian Pomp, who recognized me. Brian was the front-of-house engineer and, most important, owner of the only working cell at the festival.

“She’s with the band!” he yelled, approaching me.

“I’m with the band!” I yelled back at them. Brian got to me before they did, quickly handing me a laminate. It was like a magic amulet, and I turned and held it up to the security guards. It was like I’d scaled the Berlin Wall, and I was safe now on the other side.

“Let me take you backstage, Stormy,” Brian said. We drove there, and as we approached I saw that the stage was this huge open-air arena with about sixty thousand people already facing it. The “backstage” was a huge collection of temporary buildings, prefab cabins for each band and act. Musicians and crew were all hanging out in the summer sun, jamming and talking.

As Brian got closer to the Hollywood Undead cabin, Glen and I spotted each other. He broke into a run when he saw me, and I jumped out to run toward him. He gave me the hugest hug, and right there in a place we’d never been, we kissed for the very first time.

We would make out so much over the next four days that at the end my lips were raw. The festival had the best vibe, and I just sat with him backstage as one superstar after another walked by. Katy Perry in a polka-dot summer dress, and the All-American Rejects, already practiced rock stars. Hollywood Undead played, and I got to see him work up close. There’s nothing like watching him play drums. The band was never great or anything like that, but he is incredible.

Afterward, we went to the main stage to watch the last of the show. The headliner for the final night was Snow Patrol, a Northern Ireland band whose single “Chasing Cars” had been big in the States a few years before. But they had become absolutely huge in Europe. That year, “Chasing Cars” was named the most widely played song of the decade in the UK.

We got to stand down in front, in the wide VIP gap where security stands between the stage and sixty thousand screaming fans. The final song was “Chasing Cars,” a pure love song inspired by something the lead singer’s dad had said about some girl he was in love with. He was like a dog chasing a car, said his dad. He’d never catch it and wouldn’t know what to do if he did.

We were standing there, the sun was just setting, it was getting dark. About three minutes in, as the song reached a crescendo, the singer let the audience sing for him. Behind us, sixty thousand people paid tribute to impossible love. “Would you lie with me,” they all sang, “and just forget the world?”

Glen put his arms around me. It became, and would remain, our song.

I went on to the Amsterdam leg of Glen’s tour, and the whole trip was magical from start to finish.

It was among the best four days of my life. I finally grew some balls and did something crazy. And it worked out.

I cannot say the same for my listening tour. I recommitted to it in July, giving it a try more out of obligation than desire to actually run. It was better than being in Tampa with Moz. I was doing more national interviews, to get myself excited about it again… and then my campaign manager’s car got blown up.

Brian Welsh had parked his 1996 Audi convertible outside his apartment building in New Orleans the night of July 23. He and his wife were out walking their dog when the car exploded at eleven fifteen. I was told it was because of a Molotov cocktail, and Welsh posted a surveillance video that, sure enough, showed a person wearing a white shirt messing with the car shortly before it exploded in an action-film ball of flames. The New Orleans Fire Department didn’t rule out foul play but said the car didn’t technically explode. A small consolation, considering it looked like something you see on the news about Iraq.

“Clearly, if someone tried to blow up my car, it’s cause for concern; it’s not cause for me to stop doing my job, stop me from talking about the things that are important,” Welsh told a reporter. Good for him, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to continue if it meant my car could be next. I went home to Tampa to think about it and walked into a different kind of trap.

The afternoon of Saturday, July 25, I got to my house, which was always a cute little house even if I was stuck with Moz in it. It was a two-thousand-and-change-square-foot two-story with a porch and palm trees out front. I walked in around three o’clock to discover that Moz’s dad had been over earlier and once again chosen to do my laundry. That sounds like a nice gesture, but let’s just say that in the past I had repeatedly told Moz that I was creeped out by his dad repeatedly going into our hamper and touching my dirty underwear. I didn’t even want Moz touching my underwear anymore, let alone his dad. So, when I realized it had happened again, I was pissed.

That was what set me off, and I yelled at Moz about it. Making matters much worse, I opened some bills that hadn’t been paid, only to realize that a bunch of money was missing out of our bank account. I threw a potted plant hard into the sink, to water it or maybe just to make a point that I was tired of all this and I wanted to start my new life without him. Yes, it hit the sink hard, but it was away from Moz.

I could feel the rage building in me—I am serious about my underwear and my money—so I wanted to leave. And Moz didn’t want me to. He had my car keys, holding them high over his head when I lunged for them. When I tried to get them from him, he said I hit his head. Maybe, but it certainly wasn’t my intention. I wanted to get the fuck out of there.

He then walked into the living room like it was some sort of game, and I followed him. I knocked over our wedding album from the coffee table, which in turn knocked over two shitty candles I never liked anyway. And Moz, this publicist who had drilled into me the Hollywood rule that you never let police get ahold of the story before your PR has had a chance to spin it, suddenly decided to call the police.

And here came his new friends, the cops, rolling up to the house. They took a look at this guy, five foot nine and weighing in at 175 pounds, and arrested me for domestic violence. “I observed the victim to have no physical injuries, marks, or scratches on his body,” Officer DeSouza writes in the police report. “His demeanor was calm and very friendly.” Of course it was. I could have easily lied and said he hit me, but I would never, ever do something like that.

There are little check marks on police reports to help officers assess your attitude. I got all nos on “Alcohol Consumed,” “Fearful,” “Threatening,” “Uncooperative,” and—thank God—“Pregnant.” Next to “Angry,” you bet there’s a check mark. Oh, yeah, and on “Crying,” but it’s hard for me to admit that.

They took me to central booking at Hillsborough County jail, and they got their mug shot. There were no charges pressed, and I was free to go, but that mug shot sure was convenient to run on all the stories that focused on what a setback this was to my potential campaign. All the outlets hyping the story made note that I was “upset because of the way the laundry had been done,” but curiously left out my estranged publicist husband’s dad going into my hamper to get my dirty underwear. I never went back to that house again.

Between my campaign manager’s car going up in flames and me getting arrested so my mug shot would be everywhere, I got the message. I ended the listening tour and called off the campaign. But I wanted to make one final point in my statement. “The simple fact that David Vitter has five million dollars in his bank account pretty much says it all. Against that sheer accumulation of special-interest dollars, I have no legitimate means of winning a race for the United States Senate…. I am not not running for the U.S. Senate because I am an adult entertainment star. I am not running for the U.S. Senate for the same reason that so many dedicated patriots do not run—I can’t afford it.”

Flash forward to where those men in my life ended up: Vitter won, of course. He went on to vote to defund Planned Parenthood and block a rare bipartisan energy bill—which promised to reduce the nation’s energy costs by four billion dollars and slow climate change. He unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2015 and decided not to run for reelection. In March 2018, he registered as a lobbyist for Cajun Industries LLC, a construction company run by Lane Grigsby, a megadonor to conservative candidates and causes. Two months earlier, President Trump had nominated Vitter’s virulently antichoice wife, Wendy, to be a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. During her hearing in April, Wendy refused to answer whether she thought Brown v. Board of Ed—the 1954 case in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment—had gone the right way. But I’m the sicko.

As for Moz, he dragged out the divorce, fighting over everything and refusing to just sign the papers. I just wanted to be done with him, and one time I point-blank asked him: “Why are you being such a pain in the ass about this?”

“You’re my wife and you’re staying that way,” he said. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

Serial monogamist that I am, Glen and I immediately got together as I extricated myself from Moz. He told me he had a place in L.A. that he crashed at when he wasn’t on tour. I wanted to see him, so I scheduled an L.A. shoot for when he would have some time off. He got there a few days before me, and every time I called him I would ask what he was doing. The answer was always the same: he was either walking to Subway or coming back from there. Around the fourth time, I thought, This motherfucker loves sandwiches.

“How many sandwiches are you gonna eat?” I finally asked him.

“Not Subway. The subway.”

“L.A. has a subway?”

It does—who knew? Glen lived like a kid who happened to be a rock star. He had no car and, as I would find out, no real apartment. He just rented a room from some chick down one of the side streets across from the Guitar Center in Hollywood. “There’s no reason for me to get a place of my own because I’m gone all the time,” he assured me. But he also warned me that his roommate was “kinda” weird.

What he did not tell me was that when you got to this apartment, as I did the night before my shoot, you opened the door to a living room with nothing in it except a giant hot-pink papier-mâché squid. Its long, foot-wide tentacles were everywhere, climbing up the walls and resting on windows. It had suction cups about the size of my fist.

“She adds to it when she’s high,” Glen said.

I had so many questions. I still have so many questions. But I escaped the sea creature and got to his room. He had a mattress on the floor, a skateboard, a drum kit, and some clothes in a box. Nothing else, certainly not an air conditioner. I stayed over, and all through the night people threw bottles in the Dumpster right by his window. In the morning I showered after Glen showed me how to use pliers to turn the water on.

One night was enough for me. “I’m out,” I said, “and you’re coming with me. We’re gonna rent you an apartment.”

The new place became one of our landing pads when we weren’t on the road. Glen respected my job and never asked me about my past relationships. It never once occurred to me to say to Glen: “Guess what I did one time? I fucked Donald Trump.” Who gives their partner a laundry list of the people they’ve had sex with?

But I admit I was intensely curious about his. Not out of jealousy, but this was the first grown person I had been with who was not from the porn world. He had slept with—let’s be real—fucked loads of women on tour. He would tell me what he did with girls, and I would have to stop him like a sheltered anthropologist of sex.

“Wait, what?” I remember saying. “You didn’t know this girl and she just grabbed your dick? People do that in real life?”

He described things that maybe I hadn’t done on camera but certainly had directed in porn, but I thought it was all just fantasy. Tales of women wanting double penetration in a threesome or demanding that he cum on their face.

“You are joking,” I would say. He thought it was funny that I was so ignorant about what happened in the real world, but everything I learned about sex was from working in porn. I didn’t even know how to have a one-night stand. I could not imagine walking up to someone in a bar and saying, “Can I suck your cock? Meet me out back.” But this had happened to Glen! Out there in the straight world. I couldn’t get my head around it and I still can’t, to be honest.

As I pressed for more details about life in the real world, he let slip about one person he slept with who I never expected: my friend Amanda. Yes, the one who thought he was too dirty to even get in her car the night I met him.

“What?” I yelled, way, way more out of surprise than annoyance. “She hated you! You fucked her?”

“Maybe I didn’t,” he said. “I remember her kissing me and then I woke up and she was in bed with me.”

“You totally fucked her!”

I didn’t blame either of them. They didn’t think I had any intention of dating him. Soon after that I was in Tampa and I bumped into her on a night out networking. She was having a drink, and she put her phone down on the bar to give me a hug.

“How’s it going?” she said.

“I’m just in town for a little bit,” I said. “I’m just back from touring with Hollywood Undead.” I said it very pointedly to see her reaction.

“Oh yeah, that band,” she said. “I forgot. So, uh, you still talk to that guy?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you?”

“No, why would I do that? Though, you know, I think I ended up in his room that night….”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, but it was totally no big deal,” she said, smoothing her hair. “I actually forgot about the whole thing until you mentioned him.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Cool,” she said.

We sat there, and just as it couldn’t get more awkward, her phone rang. And her ringtone was a song from Hollywood Undead.

I wanted to laugh so hard, but I just smiled at her.

“Um, I’m, uh…,” she said, snatching her phone, “I’m gonna take this outside.”

As with almost everything that happened in my life, I couldn’t wait to tell Glen.