I started a listening tour in May, traveling the state to get a sense of the concerns of Louisiana residents. At the first stop, I didn’t think anyone was going to show up, and the place was mobbed. “For those of you who don’t know who I am,” I said at one of the many lunch places I stopped in, “I’d suggest that you don’t google that until you get home from work.” It was a lot like going to clubs for feature dancing. I was honest, I showed up on time, and I was respectful of the people who came out to see me.
It was fun at first. People thought I was going to be an idiot, and here I was able to string a sentence together. “If you get any closer you’re going to have to start tipping me,” I told the reporters who hung on every zinger. The press interest gave me the opportunity to spew some stats I knew about the dangers of defunding sex education and the corresponding rise in rates of STDs and teen pregnancy. “If you don’t want people to have the right to choose abortion,” I said, “then you have to give them sex education. You can’t have it both ways.” And when I didn’t know the answer, I didn’t hide it. “Honestly, I’m a porn star, I don’t know the answer to that question. Yet.”
I thought it would just set the campaign up for someone else, but people started writing campaign checks, and I was going up in the polls. Vitter would not debate me or even acknowledge my existence, and I just loved that he was scared of me.
Still, I walked a very fine line of not trying to make a mockery of the process or appearing that I was only doing it to further my name. Yes, I did have a spike in my website views, but I didn’t want to do a Senator Stormy video for Wicked.
One of my lines on the tour was “Politics can’t be any dirtier of a job than the one I am already in.” But I was wrong. I realized two weeks in that, just like the entertainment business but with way more repercussions, it’s about who you know and it’s about money. Vitter’s war chest was estimated at two million dollars. Right there was the real civics lesson: The person most qualified to represent the average resident of his or her state could never afford to run. Which means they will never win. Which means the people will never have true representation. It’s why we are stuck with a Congress full of millionaires. I started to get disheartened and was actually depressed for a while about that. Here I was, just doing this until an adult showed up, but what if there were no more honest grown-ups in politics?
Glen and I had continued talking every day for hours over the course of several weeks, leading up to the band’s five-week tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. In the olden days of the summer of 2009, you couldn’t use your American cell phone in Europe. He figured out we could do an audio version of a Skype call, and despite the time difference, we kept up with the daily calls. He would tell me where he was, Leeds and Wolverhampton in England, Glasgow in Scotland. I remember thinking that I knew someone who went on and on about Scotland, and then remembered Donald Trump and his stupid golf course. It didn’t occur to me to mention him to Glen. Now that he’d finally stopped calling, Donald Trump was nowhere on my radar.
About three weeks into his overseas tour, Glen confessed something. “Would it be crazy if I told you that I missed you?” he asked.
We had only seen each other twice ever, and we hadn’t even kissed. So, on paper, yes, file under crazy. But I missed him, too. “No,” I said.
“Good, because I miss you,” he said, sighing into the phone. “You should come to Europe.”
“I’ll come to Europe, don’t tempt me.”
It became like a dare. He clearly didn’t think I would just hop on a plane to see him. But maybe he knew the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t.
I knew he was playing the last day of Pinkpop, a famous three-day festival held at Landgraaf in the Netherlands. Because it’s outdoors, the venue can hold something like sixty thousand people, and Bruce Springsteen opened that weekend in 2009. Hollywood Undead were on the final night, Monday, June 1, on the tent stage with acts like the All-American Rejects and Katy Perry.
I hung up and bought a five-thousand-dollar plane ticket to Belgium. It was as close as I could get to Landgraaf, which can host such a big festival because it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere. I danced Friday and Saturday nights in Pittsburgh, then sent my luggage home with my roadie and went directly from the club for a 6 A.M. flight.
My adrenaline and “I’ll show you” energy had been pumping, so I didn’t think about what I had done until they closed the cockpit doors. This was crazy for me. Christ, what if I got there and I just hated this guy? What if this was only working because it was all on the phone and all in my head? And then I’d be trapped there for four days. On a bus with a band. What was I thinking?
When we landed in Brussels, I had a car pick me up to take me the hour-and-a-half drive to Landgraaf for the Pinkpop festival. It was only when I got out with my suitcase and saw this massive arena surrounded by a fence that I remembered one little detaiclass="underline" I didn’t have a ticket. People pay hundreds of euros for tickets, and they buy them way in advance. The weekend was sold out, as it had been the year before and the year before that. But I had to get in there.
I scanned the area and spotted a low part of the fence. I threw my suitcase over, scaled the fence, and just took off running. I heard security behind me, yelling as they chased me.
I looked back as they were gaining on me, and I saw a golf cart racing toward me. At the wheel was Brian Pomp, who recognized me. Brian was the front-of-house engineer and, most important, owner of the only working cell at the festival.
“She’s with the band!” he yelled, approaching me.
“I’m with the band!” I yelled back at them. Brian got to me before they did, quickly handing me a laminate. It was like a magic amulet, and I turned and held it up to the security guards. It was like I’d scaled the Berlin Wall, and I was safe now on the other side.
“Let me take you backstage, Stormy,” Brian said. We drove there, and as we approached I saw that the stage was this huge open-air arena with about sixty thousand people already facing it. The “backstage” was a huge collection of temporary buildings, prefab cabins for each band and act. Musicians and crew were all hanging out in the summer sun, jamming and talking.
As Brian got closer to the Hollywood Undead cabin, Glen and I spotted each other. He broke into a run when he saw me, and I jumped out to run toward him. He gave me the hugest hug, and right there in a place we’d never been, we kissed for the very first time.
We would make out so much over the next four days that at the end my lips were raw. The festival had the best vibe, and I just sat with him backstage as one superstar after another walked by. Katy Perry in a polka-dot summer dress, and the All-American Rejects, already practiced rock stars. Hollywood Undead played, and I got to see him work up close. There’s nothing like watching him play drums. The band was never great or anything like that, but he is incredible.
Afterward, we went to the main stage to watch the last of the show. The headliner for the final night was Snow Patrol, a Northern Ireland band whose single “Chasing Cars” had been big in the States a few years before. But they had become absolutely huge in Europe. That year, “Chasing Cars” was named the most widely played song of the decade in the UK.
We got to stand down in front, in the wide VIP gap where security stands between the stage and sixty thousand screaming fans. The final song was “Chasing Cars,” a pure love song inspired by something the lead singer’s dad had said about some girl he was in love with. He was like a dog chasing a car, said his dad. He’d never catch it and wouldn’t know what to do if he did.