Bad Habits (18 page)

My reign of Playmate of the Year 1994 was coming to a close. I was excited to finally be able to go from forty-volume bleach to twenty-volume bleach. I had fun on tour, but I was ready to evolve past the superficially sexy persona I was forced to portray.

But first, I had a few more dinners to attend as PMOY. Usually these dinners consisted of men who were “distributors” of the magazine in other countries. And time and time again I had to listen to the same crap that came out of their mouths.

“My wife ignores me.”

To which I had no problem replying, “Well, maybe she’s upset about something you’re doing or not doing.”

One dork replied with a thick French accent, “I do nothing wrong. I take good care of her. I don’t know what else I could do.”

I replied with a thick American accent, “Well, for starters, why don’t you take your hand off my fucking knee and sleep in
her
bed tonight?”

I finally had to come up with a creative way to keep these men from hitting on me at those dinners. It would make me so incredibly sad to watch their pathetic egos try to woo us Playmates while their wives were at home working hard to raise their kids. Somebody had to be out in the war zone defending these women. I knew I would want the same. So at the next dinner I had to attend, I came up with a plan that would no doubt turn these boys off.

I was told to sit between Receding Hair and Lazy Eye. So I bunny-hopped to my seat and shook hands with both of them. They always smelled the same (kind of like bologna) and had the same leering look in their eye, which made me want to puke up my lunch on their heads.

“Hello, hello!” Receding Hair said.

“Hi!” I responded like a sweet, innocent bunny. Then I turned to my right and put out my paw. “Hi, what’s your name?”

“Frank. My name is Frank. It’s very nice to meet you. You are very beautiful.” He then tickled my paw with his finger much like one does in eighth grade.

I did a fake giggle while holding on to his hand and turned it over to purposely call out his wedding ring. “Wow, that’s a beautiful wedding band. Is your wife’s band just as beautiful?”

Lazy Eye Frank replied, “Um … uh … yeah.”

I was on a mission. I wanted to make these men pay for their sins.

Mind you, we Playmates weren’t helping the situation by being there dressed to the nines. We were like pieces of chocolate to a table full of PMSing women.

Then I felt a nudge on my leg from Receding Hair Man, which was quickly followed with a hand trying to go up my skirt.

I’m not exaggerating. This actually happened a lot. Some girls didn’t mind. I minded. I minded all the time and didn’t put up with it. I had so much self-worth set in me at a young age, and I thank my parents every day for it. Otherwise, I would have had Receding Hair performing a body cavity search on me at this dinner.

Instead, I quickly kicked Receding Hair’s hand away and decided to utilize my weapon of mass destruction that I came up with in order to get these men to stop their sexual assaults.

I leaned over to Receding Hair and said, “Do you want to know what makes me so happy?”

“Diamonds?” he replied.

“No, silly.... What makes me happy is Jesus,” I said in the most upbeat Christian voice. “Ever since I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, my life has become blissful.”

The look on his face was like watching an inflatable balloon lose all of its air. His “I might get pussy tonight” smile quickly turned into a foul grimace. The best way to describe it is the look on your husband’s face when you farted in your ninth month of pregnancy: shocked and grossed out.

My weapon of mass destruction worked.

And, I proved that Jesus is
not
an aphrodisiac.

Receding Hair turned the other direction, locked eyes with Miss May’s ass and quickly made his way over to her like she was turkey on Thanksgiving.

I didn’t waste a beat. I turned to my right to work on Frank and his lazy eye.

“So, Frank, have you ever experienced love on a level that makes your entire body tremble with joy?”

Frank’s smile grew and the eyebrow above his lazy eye pointed up to the heavens. “Are you asking me about making love?” he asked.

“No, Frank. I’m asking you about a love that is so deep and great that if you had it in your heart, you would never have to look elsewhere for gratification again.”

“Wow,” he replied. “Where can I get some of that?”

“You can find it in Jesus and in His Father. I’m sure you’ve heard of him before. He sometimes goes by The Creator.”

Frank sat in silence. For the first time that night, he was looking at my eyes and not my cleavage. I decided to pound him into the ground with some more verbiage.

“Even though Jesus is all-forgiving, I don’t think your wife would be as understanding that you are trying to seduce a girl thirty years younger than you.”

“Did my wife hire you to spy on me?”

“No, Frank. I work for Jesus.”

He stood up, threw his napkin down, and walked to the bar.

Mission accomplished. Who knew Jesus was such a great cockblock?

As the months went on, I broke two men’s noses with my right hook and got one guy fired from his job. It was clearly time for me to go through my own metamorphosis and trade in my bunny ears for wings. So I closed my eyes and made a wish. (After years of reading spiritual books, I have come to realize those wishing moments were actually me putting out an intention. Oprah would have been proud.)

I made an intention to find a job that would allow me to show all of my colors. I wanted to be my real, funny, down-to-earth, goofy self. I wanted to break the mold of the sexy stereotype. I knew being sexy had a shelf life of twenty years in Hollywood (if you’re lucky), and I knew I was more than implants.

As serendipity would have it, I found out that MTV was having an audition for hosts for a new dating show called
Singled Out
. I couldn’t think of a better job that would allow me to be all of the things I wanted to be. I asked my manager to call and get me into the audition. I had a good feeling about this, but I needed to get in the door. When my manager called me back, he said MTV told him that there wasn’t a chance in hell they would ever hire a Playmate.

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand how they wouldn’t at least let me give it a shot. So I took matters into my own hands and crashed the audition under an alias. I was determined to show them that there
was
a chance in hell they could hire me and I was worthy of this job.

By the time the fifteenth callback happened, I was outed. They knew I was that Playmate who wanted to audition weeks prior.

Fortunately, as time passed, MTV saw that not only was I capable of the job, but I did a great job portraying myself as a self-deprecating, psychotic cheerleader who knew how to control horny men while always rooting for the girls. Something, ironically, that I learned while touring for Playboy.

On the seventeenth callback, I got the job. I couldn’t believe it. I called my mom and told her the great news.

“Mom, I did it! I got a job on MTV!”

“I don’t know what that is. I don’t understand why you don’t just take Vanna White’s job.”

God bless my mother, but I knew that this self-deprecating, psychotic cheerleader was ready to come out blazing and would soon gross out men all over America.

I was tired of being one-dimensional. I wanted to fart and pick my nose while wearing hot pants. I wanted to confuse the masses—especially men. I wanted to introduce them to a new female kind of thinking called “I don’t give a shit what you think.”

I guess it worked, because halfway through the first season of
Singled Out
, men were coming up to me telling me I was too hot to be so disgusting and I needed to stick to just being sexy because it was confusing their brains and their masturbation sessions.

By far, this is one of the best compliments I have ever received in show business. I knew that somehow, I was changing the way that women wanted to be perceived. I was leading a charge of women who hoped to prove that we can stink up a bathroom just as much as men can.

My mom and dad got divorced when I was twenty-three. Of course it was difficult on me considering how hard I worked to make sure that they were happy, but what I would soon come to realize is that sometimes divorce can make people even happier. Twelve years ago, my mom reconnected with and remarried her high-school sweetheart, a man named Tom. They love each other deeply but have never been able to fully experience utopia because of the difficulties they have gone through to stay devout Catholics after their respective divorces.

Let me explain this insanity:

The Catholic Church says that if you are a divorced Catholic, you are living in sin and are therefore not permitted to go to communion. As a Catholic, one of the requirements to avoid excommunication is to go to confession and communion once a year. Well, if you’re a divorced Catholic and can’t go to communion, after your first year of divorce, you are automatically excommunicated. This also means, of course, that you’re living in sin and will go to Hell when you die. However, there is a loophole, which states that whichever spouse dies last gets to go to Heaven again.

These are rules according to the Catholic Church.

Shocking, stupid, and true.

How they can throw my mom, my stepdad, and my dad in Hell with Hitler makes me want to protest outside the Vatican. My mom and stepdad have never missed one Sunday Mass, and both have to sit and watch everyone in the church take communion while they sit there thinking about what Hell will be like for them. I’m sure sometimes they are also praying that their exes run into the Grim Reaper before they do so they can ensure anew their tickets to Heaven.

After years of watching my parents’ struggle to remain devout Catholics, I decided to intervene and buy them a book for Christmas that I thought could help them.

It is called
All Lutherans Go to Heaven
.

After watching a horrific, circa 1970 child-birthing video during Sex Ed in seventh grade, I never in a million years could have believed I would be capable of delivering a baby. I was also scared by the enormous amount of pubes that woman had in the video. Don’t get me wrong—I’m known for my fair share of roadkill pussy, but this woman had an ape between her legs, not a squirrel.

I also had no idea vaginas could open up like that. Too bad penises couldn’t expand.

My pregnancy was nothing short of happy hell. Happy because I was pregnant, and hell because I seemed to experience every symptom I had ever read about, plus a plethora of bizarre ones that are never mentioned in the typical pregnancy books.

My hormones were so out of control that a day didn’t go by where I didn’t want to destroy my husband. I cried, threw remote controls at him, made him change the TV station if a Victoria’s Secret commercial was on, ordered him to run out for food that looked good on TV, and then made him live through the worst pregnancy farts known to mankind.

I have no doubt a lot of my stress stemmed not only from my body morphing into a house, but also the fact that I was the only breadwinner in the family. My ex hates when I talk about this, but it’s reality. Most people get to tell everyone they know they are pregnant. I had to hide it like I was giving birth to the Messiah because I feared I would be considered disabled in show business.

Plus, at this point, my career was like a plane delayed on a runway. I was twenty-nine years old and for four years I had been in holding deals. What that means is a network puts a hold on actors it likes, but by doing so, the actors are not allowed to do anything else. I was stuck in this cycle of being paid a little bit to sit and do nothing until a network figured out what to do with me. This might sound amazing to some people, but I knew that sitting around unable to work was only sending my career into no-man’s-land. People were coming up to me on the street asking, “Did you quit show business?” This was hard to hear, and it was impossible to explain that I was stuck in a vicious cycle of holding deals.