The trouble with porn stars (or I should say a specific porn star) is what almost led to a permanent breakup for Lemmy and I.
After my return from my trip to London and promptly getting fired from my job. Life with Lemmy returned to normal.
I started a new job almost at once, so my 8 to 5 lifestyle was a continuing issue. And on top of my weekday schedule of early mornings, I started volunteering at the LA Zoo. My zoo docent training would now occur every Saturday early mornings and my volunteer zookeeper training took up a couple of evenings during the week. Lemmy was getting a lot of competition that he did not like.
We also continued to fight about the usual issues in our relationship; Not going out often enough and other chicks. It was an odd time for us. I was growing up and changing and getting more involved in “outside of our relationship” activities, making new friends, new bars etc. While Lemmy was digging in deep to keep things as they were.
Now that I lived in Burbank, I was close to the Sunset Strip and Hollywood, and I had my little Nissan pickup truck, so could do as I pleased when I wanted, and I started trying new things. Lemmy hated this. More things to pull me away from the normal that we had created.
My Instincts say “Trouble ahead”!
I continued to try to “clean” to calm my nerves, and Lemmy and I watched endless movies and WWII documentaries. But something was off. My instincts were on high alert, and I sensed trouble brewing. Lemmy was picking fights with me and shouting at me over the inanest things like paper towels and how I hung them. Once I cleaned his apartment and drank one of his beers and he went through the roof. (To be fair it was a Special Brew and not available in the U.S. so…he did have reason).
He would invite me to come over to his place and then call back to have me come over at a much later time and then call back to have me over even later. He called me on August 3rd and invited me to join him at Lollapalooza. I was so excited. But then he called back to say “No, don’t come to meet me at the show, meet me at my place later”. I just couldn’t understand his behavior.
I am a cat person and had adopted a little black cat when I first moved to Burbank. Lemmy would tease me about becoming a “Cat lady” as I already had one cat. One day he surprised me with a cat statue that he saw in a catalog and thought of me. This was the thoughtful, loving Lemmy that I loved. He was so wonderful to everyone and thought of things to do for folks just out of the blue. But along with this wonderful thoughtful side, he had these moments that were selfish and childish that drove me absolutely crazy.
October 4th, Motorhead played a show at The Palace in Hollywood with WASP, and he didn’t invite me. I went anyway and could see the panic on his face when he first laid eyes on me. Something was going on and I could almost smell it. We hung out at the show as usual and went home together as if everything was ok. He seemed more upset that I had missed the Motorhead set and was raving about seeing WASP. There was some band tension there so maybe it was not all about me.
The beginning of the end?
And then one day in October, I was cleaning as usual, and I came across some Polaroid pictures. At first, I thought they were pictures of me. Lemmy had bought me that outfit – a white lacy bodysuit with a high collar – open at the chest to let the breasts out to play and a tiny jewel dangling from the lacy collar. Lemmy had taken pictures of me in the exact pose, right there on his couch. But that wasn’t me! The girl in the photos looked familiar and does from the right angle bare a small resemblance to me. Long dark hair and olive skin. But that wasn’t me.
How could Lemmy have the nerve to buy me – his girlfriend – an outfit …and buy the exact same outfit for some other chick … dress us up … pose us in the exact same position and take photos? I was sick. How could my Lemmy stoop so low as this?
I trusted him to a point, but this was a different kind of betrayal. There were other women that I knew about, and I knew that he was not even thinking of replacing me with any of them. If I was busy and couldn’t come over to spend time with Lemmy, I was totally ok with him spending time with any one of these few other women that were the normal hangers on gold-digger types. They knew who was number one > ME.
I am not saying I was happy about the situation, who would be? I thought it was wrong for him to lie. He was lying to these girls to keep them in the picture, which is wrong. An open relationship is ok, but with honesty. I knew that Lemmy cared about me, and he often told me that he loved me now. But he loved himself and he was good at justifying his behavior to get what he wanted.
And then I recognized the girl. Gang Bang Porn Star. I was furious. I have never felt pain so deeply as this. Tears filled my eyes, and I was stunned. Lemmy was reading in the bedroom. I walked in and sat on the bed and showed him the photos. He was bewildered and completely unprepared – no excuse or a way out. He went with the “how could you snoop through my stuff and gather evidence against me” way of getting loose. But I came back with “I was just cleaning and there they were” counterattack. It was not like the photos were in a safe or hidden inside of a secret place. Yes, they were in a stack of random things, but not hidden by any means. And I know never to purposely snoop if you can’t handle what you might find.
He tried to say that it was over with her and that he never really liked her that much anyway. On and on he went, and he never saw how weird it was that he had taken the same photos of both of us. I had heard rumors of his involvement with this chick and had even asked him about her before. He said that he had gone out with her once and that was it. The pictures were dated with a black marker and the date was AFTER our first conversation regarding her. He had spoken badly about her, like she was some trashy whore. I was sickened at how easy it was for him to talk so appallingly about a girl and then turn around and buy her a sexy lingerie outfit and take photos of her.
He finally went quiet. He knew how right I was and that I had every right to leave him over this. As I sat on the couch crying, he went into the room and went to sleep. Feeling stunned, I sat on the couch getting drunk and staring at the TV for a while and then I knew what had to be done. The only solution, I had was leaving and erasing myself from Lemmy’s life.
I went through his apartment and found everything that had any reference to me; photos, videotapes, letters, everything. I bagged it all up, got in my truck and drove home. The next morning, I sat on my living room floor and cut up the photos and videotape into tiny little pieces. I wanted to be gone from his life. The videotapes were something that he valued very highly, and I knew that this would hurt him. I wanted to be understood, I wanted him to feel my pain. We spoke on the phone the next day and I explained how hurt I was and how I just couldn’t continue to be made a fool of.
On November 15 I received the following letter from Lemmy:
For those of you who have a hard time reading Lem’s writing I have typed out what the letter says: Click to Open typed text
And it worked. God how I loved him. I was torn by his words. This letter has to be the greatest apology letter ever written in the history of apologies. He knew that I loved studying Shakespeare and that I love the cadence of ole English, so was on base with understanding how to get inside my head, my heart and my soul. I didn’t want to be apart from him and yet I couldn’t stay, and risk being hurt again. But I was melting. How could I not? Lemmy is a word master.
Everything changed from the moment that I saw those pictures. I had lost some respect for him. I still loved him deeply, but I now saw him differently. How I trusted him changed. But I understood his side of things. I could see that he was growing and needed time to understand his actions.
I received the following letter on December 2nd. Click to read typed.
WOW. How could I stay away! How could I leave him? I realized that he was in pain and I could not be the source of this pain. I was torn.
I wrote a return letter to Lemmy on December 6th again trying to explain my pain and why I thought what he did was wrong. Lemmy called me from Germany on the 23rd. He wanted me to pick him up at the airport when he returned from touring. I agreed.
The next day I drove to the airport and waited patiently for Lemmy to get through customs. Nervous and still extremely angry, I kept thinking “How will I react when I see him?” We drove back to his place where we discussed our relationship and how we still really cared about each other. I tried to convey how much he had hurt me, and he tried to understand. I cleaned as usual to calm myself and went grocery shopping to stock his kitchen. It was like nothing had happened, like the past few months were wiped away. Lemmy just acted like it didn’t happen, but I was still bristling under the surface. I need time to get over being hurt like that. I am relatively easy to forgive but forgetting is another matter.
A few days later the shit hit the fan. It turns out that Lemmy had no idea that I had destroyed his tapes and photos. He was hot! I thought he knew. Here we had made amends under false circumstances. Who knew? I tried to explain, and it seemed as if he mellowed out about it. But I could tell that he wanted to rip my head from my body. He kept saying ‘how could you do that to me?” “How could you hate me that deeply to want to destroy our past together?” I shrugged and said, “I thought you knew”. We argued for hours rehashing the whole incident and the reasoning behind it. It was grueling. And then we watched a couple movies. I think it was “Independence Day” and “Twister”.
New Year’s Eve that year was a mess as usual. Lemmy called my twice as we tried to make plans. He then called and said he had “to work”. I stayed home and watched the ball drop for the new year count down alone.
I was sad this New Years Eve, but little did I know that there were more romantic European trips coming soon. Life with Lemmy would still have its ups and downs, but we would settle in, and good times were coming; World trips, The Grammy Awards, Meeting some of my favorite stars, and lots of postcards. And of course, lots of Lemmy love!