He Looked like a Rock God. He Drank Like One Too.
What happens when the bad boy you couldn't resist becomes the drunk you can't fix?
He was standing against a cigarette machine with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand. Tight pastel skinny pants, cropped t-shirt, a fitted blazer, and Chelsea boots. He had the bluest-green eyes, long lashes, and a blonde shag, looking like he stepped straight out of a British rock magazine.
It was one of those rare nights out with my group of friends who had very different tastes in men than I did. They were hot for muscular, short-haired guys with money. I was a single mom with a three-year-old son, so going out was reserved for every-other-weekend arrangements with my ex, and I always chose anywhere I could hear live rock music. The Rainbow Bar and Grill was the after-hours hub for all things rock.
And there he was.
I needed a good pickup line and went with: “Who cuts your hair?”
He told me he cut it himself and asked if I’d like him to cut mine. A few drinks later, we exchanged numbers. He called the next day and asked if I still wanted a haircut.
I drove down Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles figuring this guy must have some bucks but the gigantic mansions slowly became apartments and liquor stores. His home was an old, beautifully restored Victorian on a tree-lined street. He lived in the back house.
He answered the door in a tight pair of sweatpants and a leopard t-shirt with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. His apartment: a mattress on the floor, Music Connection magazines stacked everywhere, a bottle of whiskey, and some dirty glasses.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
I opted for Jack Daniels to calm my nerves. I hate whiskey, but it was that or tap water.
He gave a good rocker cut. When finished, I looked like a blonde Joan Jett. I took a seat in the only place available, his bed. I moved the rumpled sheets aside to find a pair of women’s Betty Boop bikini underwear. Typical rock musician. I was scared, though not scared enough to leave. Like the many women in my family before me, I was drawn to bad boys. I invited him to dinner.
I made pasta, meatballs, and bought two bottles of Chianti. When an hour passed from the time he was supposed to arrive, I assumed he wasn’t coming. This was pre-cell phones, so there was no way of knowing he was lost. I opened a bottle and drank it. I was a sugary cocktail girl and that bottle of wine had gone straight to my head.
I heard the rumble of his sports car coming up the hill and opened the door to find him apologetic and looking hotter than ever. I had put serious effort into getting ready and looked almost as hot as him. I was also very drunk.
I spent the night on my hands and knees, but not in a good way. I was bent over the toilet.
If you really want to know someone’s character, let something like this happen on the first date. There was no taking advantage of me in my easy-to-unzip dress. He just kept checking on me to make sure I was okay.
I pulled myself together long enough to serve him dinner while I sat across the table looking like what is now the green vomit emoji.
“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “Dinner was delicious.”
He smoked a couple of cigarettes, said he’d call, and left. He called the next day.
We started seeing each other, and soon enough he had to pass the final test. He had to meet my son. And my son had to like him. My boy, at three, was smart beyond his years and had a mad sense of humor. I told him mommy was seeing someone, asked him to be nice, but made sure he understood that if he didn’t like him, we wouldn’t see him again. Andy had his own test ready. When Bryan arrived, my skinny little curly-headed boy walked out of his room naked, wearing his glasses on his penis, dancing. Bryan thought he was hilarious. This was the first child he’d ever bonded with.
We moved in together two months later. Shortly after, I was pregnant.
We married on New Year’s Eve, seven months after we first met. The ceremony was in a small non-denominational church in our neighborhood, and the pastor showed up drunk in a dirty suit with leaves in his hair. Somehow, he fit the scene perfectly. The guests were an eclectic mix of family, rock musicians, drag queens, and Hollywood types. Kelle Rhoads, the brother of my friend and guitar hero Randy Rhoads, sang the Alice Cooper song You and Me as I walked down the aisle in my Stevie Nicks white lace dress with flowers in my hair. He wore a fitted white suit and Capezio shoes.
My vows were Chrissie Hynde. His were Led Zeppelin:
If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you. If mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.
The reception was at a restaurant on top of a hill with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the San Fernando Valley. We danced to Jeff Beck’s instrumental Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers. We were the quintessential rock and roll couple and we were in bliss.
Six months later, our daughter was born. Bryan showed up to the delivery room wearing Groucho Marx glasses and mustache, scrubs, his camera in hand. We both wanted a girl. She was beautiful with blonde hair, green eyes, and tiny hands. We named her Summer.
Bryan had trouble connecting with her. He bragged about her beauty but couldn’t do the things that should have come naturally like holding her or playing with her. He told me early on that he never felt a connection to little kids, and he’d already had two of his own. The first was a daughter he'd never met, fathered at fifteen. A story straight out of Chinatown, her grandparents raising her as their own. The second, was a boy from his first marriage that he rarely saw.
Given his history, I’m not sure why I expected fatherhood to come naturally. I was sure I could change him. That’s how my warped fix-it logic works.
The first half of the marriage was a wild hurricane and the second was a tornado that tore through our home, causing damage that could never be fully repaired.
For a while, life was good enough to make it easy to look away. We moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, a two-story perched on the edge of a hill, our bedroom windows facing the Hollywood sign. The neighbors were an interesting bunch. The guy across the street walked his Siamese cat on a leash every morning, and a famous music producer lived up the street, so the sounds of rock bands recording drifted through the hills at all hours.
Our life became a series of parties, camping trips with the kids, and live music shows. Deer wandered onto the property like the rest of our guests, unannounced. Our house had become that house: my mother in the kitchen, Bryan's bandmates on the couch, the kids running around, and somehow it all worked. Until it didn’t.
Someone once told me that the one thing that initially attracts you to a person will be the downfall of the relationship. I thought it sounded cliché until I watched Bryan's Keith Richards routine go from fun to fucked up.
What no one tells you about alcoholics is that many of them can outdrink everyone in the room. Bryan never seemed drunk at first. He could down ten drinks and show no effect. But years later, two drinks led to slurring and stumbling. That's when I knew there was a problem. But it was just the Keith Richards persona, right? And in rock and roll, that behavior didn’t read as decline, but rather as identity.
Bryan grew up in Virginia, and by sixteen he was already on the road, playing bass guitar and touring with the Shangri-Las, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and a long parade of rock bands through the DC area. His band got signed and then dropped, so he did what any self-respecting rock musician would do. He moved to Los Angeles and landed on his feet in the Sunset Strip glam scene.
Then he turned thirty. In rock musician years, that’s ancient.
He contemplated leaving music, but that was never a real option, so he continued to play in headlining glam bands on the Sunset Strip, recording albums, being featured on movie soundtracks, and still hoping for that elusive record deal. It never came because by the 1990s, we could all feel the air going out of the Strip. The labels had packed up and headed to the Pacific Northwest, chasing grunge, and just like that, the scene we’d known was gone.
For Bryan, the only way to ease the pain of aging out of something you loved was to drink. So the drinking got worse.
As for me, my offices above the Whisky a Go Go emptied out quietly. The bands stopped calling, then the labels, and then there was nothing left to call about. The Sunset Strip, once a wall-to-wall circus of spandex and enough Aqua Net to puncture the ozone, had gone still. The posers with their flyers and their big hair had vanished, leaving nothing behind but empty clubs and the faint smell of hairspray and broken dreams.
I was always thinking about my next move. My sister and I created a new magazine, leveraging our contacts to land a deal with a major publisher and distributor in New York. It took off. That made things worse for Bryan. I had one foot in the music business and one at home, still moving forward. He had neither.
We moved an hour north to a sleepy beach town where the fog rolled in at three p.m. and the sidewalks rolled up at nine. The music scene was as dead as the fish that left their stench on the shore. Bryan stopped playing music and poured his energy into wiring hot rods, which became a fairly successful business. But when the sun went down, the drinking began. Glasses of wine became jugs of wine. Jugs of wine became boxes with spouts.
“He’s three sheets to the wind,” my mother would say.
It didn’t matter that he’d stumble into our daughter’s room thinking it was ours. That he’d fall asleep on the floor at family gatherings. That he went face-first down the stairs and ended up in the emergency room. That he passed out at a wedding with an open bar and was later found asleep in the bushes near the venue. By my account, he had a sleep disorder. That was my story and I was sticking to it.
We lived next door to my sister and her husband, but we were isolated. I rarely invited anyone over in fear of Bryan getting drunk. Family gatherings worked best in daylight. The threats to leave weren’t working. He’d beg and make promises, and then I’d find the big bottle of vodka hidden in the clothes dryer. The first DUI came without warning. I was sitting with my mom at a local hamburger joint, waiting for him to join us. He never showed. He was in jail.
On Mother’s Day, we all waited at a café for brunch and he never showed, again. The obligatory call came. He’d checked himself into a rehab, or something like that. Then they let him go and I picked him up. More of the same.
My mother’s illness ran alongside all of it. Metastatic breast cancer eventually took her life. We held her service at an old Catholic church in North Hollywood. After the reception, my cousin invited us to spend the night at her home in San Diego, a good 2-3 hour drive from Los Angeles, as a way to get away from the fresh open wound of it all. I drove in my cousin’s car with Ave Maria still ringing in my head. Bryan was supposed to drive down later. Hours passed. He never arrived. I spent the night with my cousin calling every police station and jail from Los Angeles to San Diego until we found him. He’d been arrested. Another DUI.
This was one of many final straws, but ending the marriage would mean I failed. I could make him a better father. I could make him love Italian culture, see the beauty in opera, in Sinatra. I could make him stop drinking. My daughter had other ideas. Her words were the harshest I’d ever heard from her: If you stay with him, I’ll lose all respect for you.
But I stayed. I stood by him as we released my mother’s ashes over the casinos in Laughlin, Nevada, just like she’d asked.
Then things changed. The house was quiet without my mother to distract me. My master’s thesis was done. My son was at Berkeley. My exit plan was written.
And it wasn’t the second DUI that finally did it. It was an episode of Sex and the City. I watched Carrie standing on a bed, fixing Mr. Big’s tie, and I couldn’t help but wonder, why am I with this guy? It was way past loyal. The man I’d fallen in love with had been replaced by someone who complained nonstop, had grit under his fingernails from working on cars, kept his hair long and straggly, and still wore shirts that could fit a toddler. And let’s not talk about the leopard bikini underwear.
I wanted a man with manicured fingernails and toes, who went to an actual hair stylist, who wore crisp shirts fresh from the dry cleaners. I wanted someone who wasn’t a stumbling drunk. I wanted my own version of Mr. Big.
Bryan tried to be sober. He promised it for the millionth time, and I believed him.
And then Thanksgiving came. My mother had died months earlier, so the day already felt hollow. My sister planned a vegan dinner. My closest friend knows how I melt down when family traditions are altered so she offered me a real Thanksgiving meal with all the trimmings at her sister’s house. After choking down some tofurky roast, I left for my friend’s house but forgot something at home.
I called him once, then again, but no answer. I drove back to the house and there he was, sitting at the table, guzzling down a large bottle of vodka.
He looked at me, then at the bottle. No excuses. No performance. He knew this was it, that there was nothing left to deny. The truth was finally undeniable.
I signed a lease on an apartment in Santa Monica.
And it was over.
*Author’s note. Bryan gave permission for this article to be published with his photo. He left Los Angeles for the desert years ago. He plays music for fun, builds guitars, and is still working on his 1930 Ford hot rod. He says he’s been sober for six months. I want to believe him.