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.