Sex, Lies and the Dirty (26 page)

Michele Smith is Shayne’s mom, Lorenzo’s first wife.

We meet her at this tanning salon in the Valley that she works at—my first thought upon seeing her is that she looks a lot like Crocodile Dundee. She looks fine for her age, but her skin is pretty much what you’d expect when you work at a tanning salon and have been partying hard for most of your life. Michele Smith was one of the top publicists at PMK in New York, and was a bottle rat before bottle rats existed during the Studio 54 days. That’s how she met Lorenzo. She was his publicist.

“Y’know, Shayne and I were twins in another life, Nik,” Michele says, laughing in this kind of actor-y way, like she’s on TV.

“See? Crazy?” Shayne says. “Don’t listen to her.”

“I mean, hell, we could be twins
now
for all I know, right?” Michele says, and this is when I’m supposed to be polite and agree but I don’t.

“Mom—ugh! You’re crazy!” Shayne says. “Nik, don’t listen to her. We’re not twins.”

“Yeah…I know.”

“Nik, do you like animals?” Michele asks. “You look like an animal lover.”

“They’re…okay,” but it comes out sounding like a question.

Michele starts ranting about cats and dogs and shelters and whatnot. She’s an animal kook, and she talks to me like she’s known me my entire life, which makes me uneasy. The entire family makes me uneasy.

Then we meet Dakota.

Dakota Pike is Shayne’s sister from a different father.

She was also on
Leave it to Lamas
, although Shayne was featured more prominently due to her actually being a Lamas and her
Bachelor
stint. Regardless of them having different parents, Shayne and Dakota still look at each other like real sisters since they grew up together.

Dakota has roughly the same issues that A.J. does (drinking, pills, coke, etc.), but to a lesser degree. She hasn’t yet hit that stage where she’s doing blow in a dark basement quoting the Joker. Her problems aren’t the in-your-face kind. She hides them, or tries to at least.

Dakota is in a fucked-up relationship with this dude named Benry, who was on
Survivor
⁶⁰
, I would later find out. For the most part, Dakota and Benry do drugs and fuck, but it’s not like they love each other. Celebrities or people with a name gravitate toward each other like junkies. When you’re cut from the same cloth it only seems natural that you date someone on your level, and that feeling is intensified when you add drugs into the mix.

So Dakota and Benry have both been on TV, they’ve both have had their fifteen minutes, and now that it’s over, they both want to do drugs and party. In a place like L.A., these kinds of relationships are more common than you’d think. On the outside, Dakota and Benry look like a perfectly happy and normal couple, but behind closed doors it’s about as dysfunctional as you can imagine.

Shayne and I will see Dakota, and she’ll be strung out on pills and liquor and possibly coke, and she’ll say, “Benry beat the shit out of me last night. Look at these bruises.” Dakota models her arm, and it’s spotted with welts and plum blotches. She’s crying hysterically, telling Shayne, “I’m fucking done with him! I’m done!” and Shayne will put her arm around her sister, patting her on the back like she’s seen this a million times. Calm. Collected.

The next day, Dakota will act like everything’s fine again. Her and Benry will rekindle things, party together, or do whatever it is they do to make things good again. Maybe get high and fuck. I don’t know. It’s unstable and not normal. I know I don’t want to be around it.

After meeting Dakota and seeing her drama play out—that’s right around the time I conclude how I want things to work with Shayne and me.

If meeting Shayne’s family did anything of positive note,
it’s that it made me realize what a good job my own parents did. Granted, I’m not the most well-liked person on the planet, but I’ve never touched a drug in my life, I’ve never been in an abusive relationship, and I’ve never had a kid I didn’t take responsibility for. I set rules for myself that most people in my position wouldn’t bother doing. I’m good to my wife, and I want to start a family with her, but not with these people around us.

That’s the conclusion I make.

I tell her, “I would like to start a family and have kids, but I’m not going to have people like A.J. and Dakota in their life. Lorenzo—fine, but I’m not having this dysfunctional shit around my kid.”

Shayne nods. She gets it.

If we’re starting a family, we have to give the kid a fair shot at being normal. Even though Shayne and I have long forgotten what normal is or feels like, we have to try.

59
Shauna Sand Exposed.

60
Redemption Island
season.

Origins (Part 3)

Because the concept of reality Internet had never been done before,
I wondered if it was even legal. I was going to put it all out there: the drugs and the girls with plastic surgery and all those guys going out every weekend pretending to be something they weren’t. Unmitigated exposure. What had once been confined to the clubs and celebrated, I was going to question on an open platform. I was going to break the façade. Satire it. Whether or not that would be something I could get in trouble for remained to be seen.

Beyond legality, the other issue was that I knew nothing about the Internet, outside of checking my e-mail and playing fantasy football. I had no clue how to build, maintain, and manage a site on my own. It was all uncharted territory, but the allure of the idea and my dissatisfaction with my personal life combined to be a great motivator. I needed the escape, an outlet. And no one could know. It was going to be my secret vacation away from the world, and I didn’t want anyone along for the ride. Didn’t want to share it because I had something—I knew that much, but wasn’t sure as to the scope of how it would affect the world.

So I began the process of building this thing with the little information that I had, oftentimes Googling basic questions regarding hosting and templates and stuff like that.
GoDaddy.com
was sponsoring Danica Patrick, and since my wife was friends with her, I was familiar with what it was beyond the name and Danica posing in a bikini. At that point in time, the commercials didn’t give you much more than tits and a web address, but Danica brought up what the business actually did during a previous conversation.

The first thing required was the selection of a domain name, and
Dirty Scottsdale
was the one I had in mind going into it. Jim Schaffer, a friend of mine, used to joke about how we should start a clothing line called
Dirty Scottsdale
for the club kids to wear. Maybe lingerie, too. He even bought the domain name for it, but that’s about as far as it went. I got busy with the NPMG scam and Jim got busted for some Internet porn scandal, and the last I heard about the site was that he let the domain expire.

So I bought
Dirty Scottsdale
for $19.95 with this package deal called “website tonight.” It was a basic three-page layout. A starter kit, really. There was never any intention to have millions of visitors, so the whole thing started out small and janky: basic fonts, crappy layout, a gay-ass Lamborghini at the top of the page. At the time I thought it was cool, though, because I was building a voice. A persona. This was going to be the place where I could say the things that were on my mind and people could respond. Right at the top, I wrote, “First ever reality blogger.”

I researched sites like
TMZ
and
Perez Hilton
and noticed that they had this kind of funny, snarky tone to them. Perhaps if I’m funny and sarcastic and just say what’s on my mind, I thought, maybe it’ll work. I was going to be the
TMZ
for civilians and non-celebs. Fame-chasers. The name was missing though. My name. My Internet handle.
The Simple Life
⁶¹
was big at the time, and Perez had already ripped his name from one of the girls. Paris was that hot chick that just wanted to be loved and fucked. Nicole was darker. So maybe I could be the cool and edgy Nicole Richie, I thought. A Yin to Perez Hilton’s Yang. He could do the celebrity bullshit; I would be underground.

And that’s how Nik Richie was born.

I found pictures of Alexa Carlson.

She was at the clubs every night: Pussycat Lounge, Suede, and 6. They were the same clubs I was going to, but we were there for different reasons. She went to be seen, to be photographed and adored. Alexa was one of the “it girls” of Scottsdale. Everybody knew her, or at the very least, knew of her. So I made her an example. On the site, I put up her picture and said, “She looks like a gorilla. We should call her G-Girl.”

I said what was on my mind. No filter.

No regard for how she’d react or feel.

Meanwhile, at NPMG, I was officially checked out. Sean was trying to weasel his way back in from the field and I had lost all motivation to stop
him. At any given point of the day, I was either job-hunting on the company’s computer or working on my blog: posting another club promoter, another socialite. I was posting these people and I noticed the comments field was steadily growing in numbers. It was going viral right before my eyes. Not even a few days later, I woke up and had over two hundred comments, saying things like:

“I’m going to kill this Nik Richie guy.”

And: “Who the fuck is he?”

People were talking, and not just online. I would go out to the clubs and the tone had changed. Guys were pissed off; girls were worried they’d be next. It was the first time in my memory that photographers were being turned away for fear that the picture would end up on my site. There was speculation and paranoia. There was laughter. Bartenders were asking me, “Dude, have you been to
Dirty Scottsdale
yet? It’s fucking hilarious.”

To which I’d say, “Nah man, haven’t seen it. I’ll have to check it out.”

The intrigue around Nik Richie and who I was going to post next took over the nightlife scene. People either loved me or hated me, but no matter what, I was the center of conversation. A point of distraction. A voice people listened to. There was finally someone calling out the guidos and tool-tards
⁶²
, all those guys trying to buy popularity with overpriced liquor and Ed Hardy shirts. People had always had unfavorable opinions, but it took a Nik Richie to actually come out and say them. Nik was the ego-check that Hooman Karamian couldn’t be, and the reactions varied from mild amusement to violence.

People were getting jumped in bathrooms. There was a $10,000 bounty being offered to the person who discovered my identity. I was still going out at night to interact with these people, to study them, but the air had clearly changed. The state of decadence that had once defined the city was slipping, and it was all Nik Richie’s fault.