Chapter 2 Unholy Matrimony
Unholy Matrimony
BEFORE I WAS BUNNIE, BEFORE THE DRUGS, THE MEN, and the money, and before everything I am today, I was just a bouncy little brunette baby girl named Alisa in Houston, Texas.
My pops was a musician—and a great one at that.
Bill Carter was the lead guitarist and lead singer in a big Texas band called BC and Company.
He lived the rocker life, and all the clichés of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll were Bill’s legacy—like when he stole the lead singer of ZZ Top’s girlfriend and found himself facing down bullets through the sunroof of his limo.
Dad played the circuits, and he was even supposed to sing “The Gambler,” but the higher-ups at United Artists gave it to Kenny Rogers instead.
You know Bill held a grudge. We weren’t allowed to even mention Kenny’s name in our household, and whatever Dad said went.
My pops was born in Queens, New York, to my Brazilian grandmother, Zenaide, and his father, Bill senior.
It wasn’t an ideal home for any kid. His father was a vice president of Valvoline oil company, and my Vovo was an immigrant, which didn’t leave her very many career choices, so she became a stay-at-home mom.
That woman hung my moon and my stars. When I think of the model of fierce feminine energy and love from my childhood, it’s her.
But she didn’t show Bill the same love she showed to me.
My dad’s father ended up leaving Zenaide for his mistress, who he also had children with—and it just broke her.
In return, she abused my father mentally, verbally, physically, and emotionally.
I’ve heard from random family members that she was the meanest woman they’d ever met.
But for some reason, with me, she never once raised her voice or hands.
She only told my father that she loved him one time in his whole life.
My heart breaks for the little boy in him who never healed.
Bill attended a college prep school—where he learned that musicians seemed to get all the ladies, so he taught himself how to play guitar and sing.
He had a voice like Sting. Bill soon discovered that he could find the love his mother never gave him in the different women he would meet.
And until the day he passed, he chose abusive women who never deserved him, replaying the dynamic he had with his mom over and over again.
Bill caused me no end of trauma, but we did have some good moments too, and those I will cherish for the rest of my life.
We bonded over music—it was our thing. I’d listen with him for hours in our home studio, watching him sing and play guitar.
Sometimes, he’d call on me to be his backup singer.
Billy Ocean never saw us coming! My dad would play Billy’s tracks and replace Billy’s vocals with his own over a microphone blasting through our studio, and I was his backup, ready to sing my heart out with my own mic in hand.
If we were really into it, I’d do a backup-singer shimmy like the girls I saw on MTV.
He always encouraged me to get out in front as the star of the show, and when people came to visit, he had no problem hyping me up and letting me perform a full production with mics and background music.
Those memories will forever make me smile.
Mom was a stripper, and they met at the club.
Bill was thirty-three when I was born and Vanessa was, apparently, twenty-two, but she liked to say that Dad made her lie about her age on my birth certificate.
Dad always liked his girls young. Their relationship was the typical stripper-musician toxic love affair.
Mom was a drug addict and a paranoid schizophrenic, so lies were her only means of communication, and most of Dad’s relationship with her was trying to sift through what was real and what was in her head.
It was all partying, lying, screaming, and Dad eventually wound up in the hospital with hepatitis from shooting blow.
(They lied to me for years and said it was from food, but Bill later confirmed it was drug-related.) While Dad recovered, Mom left me in a car seat on some stranger’s doorstep and ran off with the organ player in Dad’s band.
Going to the lengths I am now to have a child of my own, I could never imagine abandoning my baby and not having a care in the world about what happened to her.
Some women just weren’t meant to be mothers.
Dad got out of the hospital and hunted me down.
I was locked in a closet on the other side of town when he found me.
He divorced Mom and sued for full custody of me—and honestly, rightfully so.
Again. What the fuck, Vanessa?
Mom didn’t put up a fight, and Dad became my sole parent. She wouldn’t reenter the scene until one night on AOL Instant Messenger when I was twenty-two. I wouldn’t physically hug my mom until I was thirty-six. When she left, I was three months old.
* * *
AFTER MOM RAN OUT AND she and Dad divorced, it was just me, Bill, and his group of best friends.
I called them all my uncles, and they’d take toddler-me to bars, sit me up on the pinball machine, and let me watch the flashing lights for hours.
Some kids have toys—I had three men and a barmaid.
Babies in bars—what a time to be alive. Dad said it was his fault I’ve always been attracted to bright lights and glittery things. It all began on that pinball machine.
My job was to be the comic relief. All I wanted was to make him laugh, especially when things got hard.
If I could get Bill to crack a smile, the world would be okay.
Even until his last days, I was just trying to make the man laugh.
I never cried in front of him. I couldn’t let my guard down that way.
I’d rather fight back tears than let him see me be weak.
He was a rocker raising a little girl, and it definitely wasn’t three meals a day for me.
He used to feed me cheese and raw hot dogs, which he kept in his jacket pocket.
Years later, I had to break the habit of eating raw hot dogs once I finally started taking care of myself.
I love those fucking things. And Vienna sausages. Don’t judge me.
There were always women around, coming in and out of our place.
I saw everything. Bill had a bad habit of bringing women home and doing the deed right in front of me when I was a young child—literally in the living room where I was supposed to be sleeping.
I may have been only two or three, and maybe he thought I wouldn’t notice or understand.
Or that I wouldn’t remember. But those memories are forever burned in my brain.
I’ve seen women passed out on our couch, and I’ve seen them stay the same age as he got older.
None of them stuck around for long, and there were always more of them for Bill to choose from.
This went on until one day when I was five years old and Mindy entered the picture. Everything was about to change.
* * *
I WAS A TINY KID sitting on a big motorcycle with Dad when Mindy came up to me and introduced herself.
“I’m Mindy,” she said. “I’m gonna be your new mom.” Instantly, my defenses went up. My new mom? Is this woman insane? Does she not know the line of women my pops has going? Get a grip, lady.
Right off the bat, I sensed that she wasn’t a good person. I was only five, but I could see right through her facade. Reading people’s energy came early for me, and there was a sinister power just radiating off her. It pulsed stronger as she flashed me a fake smile.
To her irritation, I didn’t reply right away. I kept looking down, tinkering with the keys in the ignition on the bike. I had a thousand thoughts running through my head.
Bill could tell I wanted to leave, but he told me, “Be nice, Alisa.” I managed to smile at her and giggle, but I knew this shit show was about to start.
It went from that conversation right into unholy matrimony.
I begged him not to marry her. I screamed and pleaded.
I knew what my life would look like with her, and she proved me right the minute she came home with us.
Screaming. Dragging me by the arm until I thought my shoulder might come loose.
She didn’t raise a hand to me yet, but I knew it was coming.
But Bill didn’t listen to me. He never listened to me.
Come two months later, I was a flower girl in their wedding.
Terrified and furious, I sulked through the entire ceremony.
My life was blowing up, and I was losing my dad to the Wicked Witch of the South.
I wasn’t going down in this unholy union without a fight.
I did everything I could to make the wedding miserable for everyone.
She had picked the most hideous powder-blue bridesmaid dresses, the fluffy, frilly 1980s frocks from hell.
I was so mad I was being forced to even be in this clown show that I ripped the shit out of my dress.
I tore it to shreds. To this day, I can’t wear blue clothes or even blue eyeshadow because of that blue dream scene they chose for a wedding.
Barf. They had to throw me in a stairwell to scream it out alone, and without anyone watching me, I ran up and down the stairs, hell on wheels, absolutely losing my shit.
Pretending to be Alice in Wonderland and escaping from my reality. Finally, the ceremony was over.
“Do you want to call me Mindy or Mommy?” she asked immediately after they said “I do.” I looked up at her like What the fuck? Lady, you have been married for an hour and you’re already trying to assert power.