Sinner Takes All

CHAPTER 15 Trust

TERA: The following weekend, I flew out to Brooklyn to visit Evan. He took me on a motorcycle ride around Manhattan on his gorgeous West Coast Chopper built by Jesse James. We pulled up to the club Lotus and ran into Dante Ross, who was Erik’s producer, though I didn’t know it at the time. Evan introduced me to Dante as “my girlfriend, Tera.” Dante looked me up and down and clearly recognized my name and who I was. He must have called Erik right away because the next thing I knew Erik started blowing up my phone and leaving dozens of messages—thirty to be exact. “You fucking whore. I know you’re with another guy. What’s going on? Call me back.” I never called him back.

Evan had run out for an errand and I was alone in his loft in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, freaking out over Erik’s barrage of messages. There was no way I was going to call him back or pick up the phone. Since Erik didn’t respect me, I didn’t give him the respect to tell him I had moved on. I didn’t think I owed him anything. Erik had been on tour when I met Evan and he wasn’t calling me that much, and I wasn’t calling him. I never officially broke it off with him because I didn’t want a confrontation. It was just easier to move on quietly and let what we had fizzle into oblivion.

EVAN: When I first met Tera, I didn’t know she was dating Erik. She didn’t tell me anything about her dating life. She kept it kind of vague. When I came back to the loft that day, she was clearly upset and had been crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, “I don’t want to tell you. You’ll get mad.” At that point in our relationship, there was nothing she could tell me that would get me mad. I was in love with this girl. She said, “Well, I was dating someone before you and he won’t stop calling.” OK, no big deal, I thought. “And um, you know him,” she said. Oh, great. It’s always sticky if your girl dated someone you know, but it’s nothing you can’t get over if you want to get over it.

“Just tell me, it’s OK,” I said calmly.

“It’s Erik, er, Everlast,” she said. I could tell she was scared to say his name.

TERA: I was scared. I was already in love with Evan and I was really afraid that Evan would break up with me. I thought this was the make-or-break moment for our relationship. He was either going to leave me and say, “Fuck you and all your drama” or he was going to man up and support me and say, “No worries. We can handle this together. I’ll take care of it.”

I wasn’t playing one off the other, either. I honestly didn’t think Erik would care if I was dating someone else. He never cared while we were together, why would he care now? I told Evan, “Listen, you are the one I want to be with. I’ve been over him for a while now. I don’t want to be with him.” And Evan trusted me.

This was the first time I turned to him to help me handle my shit. And when he did, I realized what a strong man I had in Evan. He made me feel safe, and I needed that.

EVAN: I just thought, OK, well, I’ve known him for a decade. My band Biohazard and his band House of Pain toured together in 1994 and we were all friends. Erik and I weren’t boys, though. He was just a little less friendly than his band mates, but I didn’t have any animosity toward him. Even though this would be awkward, I knew what I had to do. I had to give him a call and straighten this out.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I called him up. Erik put on his hip-hop voice and said, “Who dis?”

“It’s Evan.”

He got quiet.

“Why you calling my house on a Sunday?”

“You know why. It just came to my attention you’re blowing up my girl’s phone. Thirty messages from you? She ain’t seeing you no more, she’s with me.”

This was awkward for me, too. I’m not the kind of guy who wants to step on another guy’s territory, but this wasn’t that situation. I knew Tera was telling me the truth when she said they hadn’t been seeing each other.

“This is my girl and I love her. Don’t call her anymore,” I told him.

I remember him saying something like, “I ain’t sweating her. I don’t give a fuck about her. She’s just some porno bitch,” he said, sounding like a hurt guy. He was so negative. Then he said, “Y’all two are mad corny.”

“‘Corny’? What do you mean ‘corny’? What the hell?”

“Ya’ll just corny, both of you. If I see y’all at the club, you all should bounce.”

“Dude, I haven’t seen you in a club in ten years. Just stop calling.”

(That was the last she heard from Erik, until five years later in 2008 when Tera cohosted a party at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for a tattoo parlor opening and she had to introduce both Everlast and my new band the Spyderz. We never saw him, talked to him, or heard from his camp that night, though.)

TERA: As I said Everlast’s name on the mike that night in 2008, all I could think about was, “You said no one would want to marry a porn star? Evan was man enough to.” I felt good. I won out in the end.

While Evan and I didn’t fight over Erik or my past, we did fight about his past. I had the green-eyed monster in me when I first met Evan. I think I was so insanely jealous because I was so afraid of losing this amazing man. I couldn’t believe this fairy-tale romance was real. I was very skeptical of it and had a hard time accepting the love he was trying to give me.

Our very first fight happened shortly after we met, when I was visiting him in Brooklyn. He was on the phone with his ex-girlfriend and I overheard him say to her, “Listen, I’m in love. I’m with Tera now. You’re gorgeous. You’ll find someone else.” Apparently, his ex-girlfriend wanted Evan back and Evan was turning her down gently. In my warped mind, instead of being happy at hearing him say he’s happy now and not to call him, I latched on to the “you’re gorgeous” part of that call and flipped out on him. I turned around and spat venom at Evan: “Who is gorgeous? Who are you talking to?”

“Uh, it’s my ex. I’m telling her I’m with you,” he said.

“Why are you talking to your ex in front of me?” I screamed. I completely overreacted and freaked out on him. “How dare you tell her she’s gorgeous? You are never to talk to your ex again.” I was irrational and I just went off.

He was like, “OK, you’re right. I’ll never speak to her again.”

Looking back on it now, I can’t believe how crazy jealous and insecure I would get on him and how he always handled it the same way: with compassion, understanding, and respect. Evan had the patience of a saint with me. Any other man would’ve left my insecure bullshit and me. But Evan called me on that bullshit and gave me what I needed in a relationship: love, support, and, at the time, constant reassurance. He handled me like a pro. He always made me feel better and made me trust him and he never did cheat on me or do anything wrong. But it took a while before I could believe it was true. It took me a while to really trust that I found the one thing I was searching for my whole life: a man to treat me well and whom I could love until death do us part.