Sliding Into Home (15 page)

A few weeks after I moved into the Mansion, out of nowhere I was given a large amount of cash from Hef. As it turns out, I was supposed to get $1,000 a week as an allowance. I had no idea that was part of the deal when I moved in, but I was sure as hell happy to take it. I would have moved in regardless of the money, though; living in a Mansion with free food was enough for me.

I think Hef didn’t mention the allowance because he doesn’t want girls to move in for the money; he wants us to move in for him. And I did. Hef had already done so much for me—buying me clothes, paying off my rent—that I was never going to ask for money. Just like when I was a kid, I hated asking for money as an adult. But having the money was a nice bonus. Now I could finally live a little.

I started going out during the day and enjoying Los Angeles. I met a few Playmates and actually made a few friends. Slowly, I started getting used to the whole lifestyle.

At night, though, I would be in my pj’s by nine
P.M
. and usually in the kitchen by nine thirty for burgers, cheese fries, and a stomachache—in that order.

It was a depressing routine and it got even worse when I started to gain weight. When you eat that garbage every night and lie around all day, it’s bound to happen. After six months living there I had put on a good fifteen pounds and my confidence was at an all-time low.

It was tough to deal with the fact that I was gaining weight, and being surrounded by beautiful girls every day didn’t help. Plus, every week we would get photos of ourselves that had been taken the one night a week we all went to the club or to a
Playboy
event, so I could look at the photos and see myself getting fatter from week to week.

One night we were all in the limo on the way to a book signing with Hef when he pulled me aside.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I feel fat, Hef,” I told him. “Everyone is so pretty. It’s making me really insecure.”

“Well, you look a little bigger,” he said honestly. “Maybe you can go to the gym.”

When we got home I went to my room and cried myself to sleep. I was so disappointed in myself. I had this whole Mansion and a great life to enjoy and all I was doing was lying around and eating. I felt so lazy and miserable. This was supposed to be paradise, but for me, it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the parties were great, but every time they ended I would go back to feeling alone and lost. I guess there is a fine line between happy and sad—and on that line is a big plate of chili cheese fries.

CHAPTER 12
 

Party Hopping with Bunnies

A month in, I was really on the fence about whether I should stay at the Playboy Mansion. Yes, I had new clothes and a weekly allowance, but I was also bored to death and gaining weight by the second. I didn’t know how much more I could take.

My mom, who was against me moving there in the first place, changed her mind about
Playboy
once I was settled. She hates change, and if it were up to her I would never try anything new, but shortly after I moved in she and my grandmother came to the Mansion to visit, and she quickly fell in love with my new life. Hef took us all out to a nice steak dinner and treated my mom and my grandmother like family. They all instantly bonded, and my mom saw not only the kind of life I was now living but also the great man I was living with.

From that visit on she considered the Mansion a place I should stay the rest of my life—not just for the money, but for the comfortable
family environment it provided. So, when I called her complaining and told her I might move back home, she fought me on it.

“Where would you be if you weren’t there?” she asked. “Papa John’s?”

It was tough love, but it was what I needed. Mom was right. It was time to make the best of the situation. This was the freakin’ Playboy Mansion, after all. I needed to start having some fun. So I decided to whip my ass in shape, both mentally and physically.

I began playing in a softball league—at first with some of the people who worked at
Playboy
, and then later with random teams. I missed playing sports, and this was a good way for me to get in shape and have some “me” time. Plus it was cool to come back to the Mansion with my knees all bloodied and have everyone ask me what happened. I also started going to the gym and really working off those chili cheese fries.

I did my best to get out more and make friends with some of the other girls in the house and in the Playmate guesthouse. Some girls were great. I quickly bonded with Destiny Davis, a 2005 Playmate. We both loved hip-hop, and we were alike in so many ways. We called each other PIC because we were partners in crime—two ghetto white chicks always looking for fun. Then there was Tiffany Fallon, the 2005 Playmate of the Year, who was the one girl I saw as a role model at that place. She was classy, polite, always smiling, and constantly doing things to make
Playboy
look good. She was a real inspiration and a great friend.

I also got close to Carmella DeCesare, who, like me, loved sports, and was a really down-to-earth chick. She’s married to quarterback Jeff Garcia, so of course she followed football, but she also loved basketball. During the Playmate of the Year dinner—an annual
formal dinner, which that year honored Sara Underwood as the magazine’s top centerfold—Carmella and I were more interested in the Lakers playoff game than the dinner. I wore a Lakers jersey to a fancy restaurant and all the girls angrily talked behind my back about how disrespectful I was. But the playoffs were more important to me, and Carmella and I kept getting up to check the score in the bar. I knew we would be friends from that day forward.

These girls, and some of the other Playmates, were really cool. We’d stay up until four
A.M
. laughing and having a great time, and then we’d go into the kitchen and hang with the butlers.

Bryant, DeAndre, Carlena, and some of the chefs were like my best friends. They were real people, and I liked that. At first we kept our conversations to general topics, but once they got to know me I opened up to them about all of my concerns about the Mansion. None of them thought I would last, but they were always there to hug me and stay up until five in the morning to listen to me whine about my problems. We had to be sneaky, though, because the staff wasn’t really allowed to fraternize with the girlfriends. I think in the past girls had been caught sleeping with some of the staff, so Hef kept them off-limits after hours. On the rare occasion when Hef left his room late at night, the butlers or chefs would hear Hef’s slippers shuffling across the floor and scatter and hide. Hef would walk into the kitchen and I’d be standing there by myself.

Even with the staff to entertain me, nights were hard because while my Playmate friends got to go out and party, I would have to be home by nine
P.M
. I’d get a text message from a girl that read, “Having so much fun in Vegas. Wish you were here! Partying with
all these football players,” and that was devastating. I felt so trapped and angry when I was missing out on something good.

However, sometimes when I would get out of the house, I would end up in bad situations with Playmates who were up to no good. One of those girls was former Miss United States Teen Kari Ann Peniche, who was staying at the Mansion for a few weeks while she shot a spread for the magazine.

Most of the girls at the Mansion were good girls, but Kari Ann had a different agenda. Her IMDB credits currently include
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew
and a sex tape with Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane, but at the time I didn’t know anything about her and I thought we could be friends. She seemed to know everyone in L.A., and all the fun places to hang out.

One day we were driving around Beverly Hills and she said she wanted to stop at her friend’s house. We pulled up to a big apartment building on Doheny Drive and made our way to the unit where her “friend” lived. We rang the bell and an older guy answered the door and invited us inside. Although I thought he was a little weird, I just went along with it. Then he broke out a plate of cocaine.

Oh, no!
I thought.
This isn’t good.

I felt very uncomfortable. I had been clean for so long and since then had never really been tempted to do real drugs. There was a stripper at Cheetah’s who I was friends with who did coke, but for some reason it was easy to say no back then. This time felt different. I was so far removed from the whole drug scene. I really had moved on in life. I smoked weed from time to time, but that didn’t count. This was serious, and I was nervous.

Without the slightest hesitation, Kari Ann leaned over and did
a line. Then she asked me if I wanted some.
What’s one time really going to do to me?
I thought.

So I did it. I leaned over and snorted a line of cocaine. For the first minute or two it was the best damn feeling in the world. So much time had passed that I’d almost forgotten how it felt—it was amazing.

“This is some of the best shit,” Kari Ann said.

I agreed, but when we left and I got in the car, I started getting paranoid. All these bad moments from my past started running through my head, and I started bugging out.

“What did I do?” I asked Kari Ann.

“Isn’t it great?” she said.

“No, but I used to do it and—”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s pure stuff. You won’t get addicted. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“But you don’t understand . . .”

I didn’t bother explaining. What was I going to do, tell her my whole life story? She wasn’t going to understand.

We went to SkyBar at the Mondrian Hotel on the Sunset Strip and I was miserable. I felt so fucked up. The night finally ended and I tried to block it out of my mind. I knew I’d made a mistake, and I was never going to do it again. I just wanted to forget about it and move on.

For Kari Ann, it was a different story. Somehow word got out that she had coke around the Mansion, and eventually the news made its way to Hef. I’m not sure who ratted her out, but drugs were a big no-no at the Mansion. Hef was very strict about it. He was a big supporter of legalized weed, but when it came to coke and other drugs he wouldn’t stand for it. It was bad for
Playboy
’s image. Holly and
Bridget were against it, too. They were real goody-goodies, and I think that’s why Hef trusted them so much.

I, on the other hand, was always right on the edge of going off and doing something bad. The only way for me to survive was to cut Kari Ann out of my life completely. Later, when Hef had whatever confirmation he was looking for, he called Kari Ann into his office and told her she had to leave.

I was happy that she was leaving. But my involvement with her wasn’t over just yet. Everyone knew that she and I had become friends and I started to worry that Hef or the girls would connect the two of us and think I was doing drugs, too. People seemed to know everything about everyone at the Mansion, and I was sure Holly and Bridget knew I’d done coke with Kari Ann that day.

Soon after Kari Ann left, Mary O’Connor, Hef’s personal secretary, called me into her office and started asking me questions about her. They wanted to know if I was still talking to or texting her. She had been texting me, but I always ignored her. Normally I would stand up for a friend, but with Kari Ann, I understood. They didn’t want her near anyone involved with
Playboy
. Her departure was the best thing that could’ve happened to me, because if she had hung around I’m sure I would have been tempted to do coke again.

Kari Ann wasn’t the only crazy one hanging around at the Mansion, though.

There was also a Playmate from Atlanta, and when she came to the Mansion I thought she was so beautiful, and she seemed like a fun girl. We ended up going out one evening, again to SkyBar, and everything was fine. I was drinking, and there was no sign of drugs.

We were supposed to go to The Improv comedy club on Melrose Avenue for the night; we’d told the staff at the Mansion that’s what
we were doing, and I wanted to stick to the plan in case someone came to check up on us (which was always a possibility).

I don’t know if she drank too much or was on something else, but all of a sudden she began grinding up on this random nasty-looking, blond-haired dude. Meanwhile, I just stood by myself at SkyBar counting the minutes until we had to leave for the comedy club.

Eventually she came up to me and gave me some bogus story about how the guy didn’t have a ride home, and she asked if we could take him. I tried to say no but she kept insisting. We drove him to a house all the way up in the Hollywood Hills, and when we arrived she got out of the car and went inside with him, leaving me outside alone.
What the fuck?

After about twenty minutes I went inside the house and started shouting her name and looking all over for her. I wanted to get to the comedy club, and I was sick of waiting. I opened a door to one of the rooms, and there she was with the guy, butt ass naked and doing lines of coke.

I yelled that it was time to go. Looking a little drugged-up and out of sorts, she got dressed and we went to the comedy club without the guy. A few years earlier, I probably would have stripped down and joined them—but not anymore. I just wanted to get to that comedy club and fucking laugh before I got even madder.